


In the Darkness (With You)

by vailkagami



Series: (Boy) Kings [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Murder, New God!Cas is the villain, Psychic Bond, Suicide, Torture, main characters die in the beginning and stay dead and are still the heroes of this story, temporary mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-02
Updated: 2012-08-02
Packaged: 2017-11-11 06:41:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/475680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the beginning, Dean kills his insane brother, then himself, in an act that forever closes Heaven’s gates for him. And for a while, all is fine as they are clinging to the world of the living and each other, trying the ghost thing and haunting Sioux Falls. But death is no cure for insanity and a damaged soul has only one way it can go. Fortunately, death is no cure for love either, and separation will never be an option.</p><p>Prequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/268682">Above and Below</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the [spn-j2-bigbang](http://spn-j2-bigbang.livejournal.com/). It was betaed by the very thourough [quickreaver](http://quickreaver.livejournal.com) and [gwendolynd](http://gwendolynd.livejournal.com), who made this much better than it would have been otherwise, and its creation was generally supported by [nightrider101](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nightrider101/).  
> The wonderful art, done by [padacocking](http://padacocking.livejournal.com) can be found [here](http://padacocking.livejournal.com/966.html).

Three days ago, it snowed for the first time this year, but it all melted again before the temperatures dropped well below zero yesterday. Mel likes the snow, but she doesn’t like the cold, and she doesn’t like the two guys that enter her diner in a gust of cold air, since they are of the inconsiderate kind that so annoys her in winter. They stand inside the opening and look around as people sometimes do when they aren’t quite sure if this is really the place they want to be, and in the process they let out all the warmth that the tiny heater and a few dozen guests needed all day to accumulate. Without a single thought for the dropping level of cosiness inside they stick their heads together and exchange some quiet comments, the taller one sounding sceptical, though Mel can’t make out what exactly he’s saying. Probably the décor isn’t to her linking, she thinks sourly, or the menu, or whatever else it is they need to have a discussion about in the open door in the middle of November. At least they manage to step in before she has to glare them into submission, but her opinion of them is ruined from the beginning.

Still she forces a smile onto her face when she goes to their table despite the lingering cold that’ll need at least half an hour to disappear, because smiling at the customer is part of the fucking job description. They ask her to come back later because they haven’t decided what to eat yet, which, okay, she didn’t really give them time for, but it still pisses her off. They’re good looking, the two of them, she has to give them that, but being good looking is not an excuse for being assholes simply by existing.

Which is what they are. It’s not like they have done anything to her, as such. They just kind of rub her in the wrong way. The tall one gives her an apologetic smile, though, and looks somewhat embarrassed for no damn reason, so Mel is a little more willing to forgive him for his presence.

What points that smile bought them are lost when the other one calls her over, flashes her a smile that says he’s convinced every girl in the world is straight and into him in particular and tells her that he would like the chicken burger and the fries, but without any salt, please.

“Without salt,” she repeats. “Fries.”

“Yes. I’m allergic.”

“Allergic to salt.”

“He actually is,” the other one confirms. “It’s rare but it happens. Believe me, you don’t want to see what happens when he even touches the stuff. It’s important that there is no salt anywhere on his food. I’ll have the salad, please.”

“He’s allergic to meat,” the short one helpfully provides and gins, even as Mel can tell he’s being kicked under the table. She rolls her eyes as she walks to the kitchen to tell the cook that he needs to make a burger and fries without salt because otherwise their guest will die and he will sue their asses when he’s dead.

She’s pretty sure they made that up just to annoy her.

The cook gives her a confused look at her obvious bad mood but she just shrugs at him. She can’t even explain why she has such a problem with those two guys. One of them seems a little cocky but charming enough, the other is kind of sweet with his obvious embarrassment about his companion, who, judging by their behaviour, can only be his brother, or at least a cousin. But something about them irritates her for no reason she could explain. She wants them gone and can’t even tell why.

It feels like the instinct that sometimes tells her that someone is following her in the dark. And just like that instinct, it’s (probably) bullshit. It’s just, they give her chills, and not just because of the cold air they dragged in.

Regardless, she brings them their food with a smile and they both smile back, one with self-confidence and one still looking uncomfortable and strangely guilty.

They probably murdered someone on their way here and now he feels bad for the police force that will soon shatter the door and scare off the other guests. But then, if they had murdered someone, he probably wouldn’t feel bad about the _door_.

Still. They are talking all through their meal and they keep their voices down almost to a whisper all the time as if it was top secret and no one could be allowed to hear a word of it. As if anyone would care.

Really, don’t they know that whispering is the best way to make everyone want to listen? Mel finds herself trying despite herself, but the only thing she can make out is the short one (well, shorter than the other one, anyway, which really isn’t hard) complaining about how bland the fries taste without salt.

So much for that.

The taller one seems to be pissed about something. He’s glaring and hissing a lot and looking around all the time for no goddamn reason. It makes her nervous, even though his companion doesn’t seem to be concerned about anything but the food on his plate. Maybe Mel feels so uncomfortable around them because things are tense between the two of them and she picked it up. They certainly seem to be at odds about something, what with all the hissing and glaring. Either way, she’ll be glad when they finally leave.

Except she isn’t. Because she takes care of another table and when she turns around they are gone, empty plate and half-eaten salad bowl sitting before empty chairs. She didn’t notice them go. And of course, they didn’t pay.

At least now she knows what the tall one felt so guilty about, she thinks sourly when she moves to clean up the table.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

_Sam died on a Sunday. It was a shitty day, cold and rainy, with wind that made sure the rain got into everything, and there were puddles of freezing water everywhere, just waiting to be stepped on. At least, that was what Dean imagined the day to be. He could imagine anything he wanted because their cell had no window and maybe wasn’t even on Earth. He imagined it was a day like that because he hated days like that, and he decided that it was a Sunday because Sunday was the worst day of the week. For most people it was Monday, but a hunter never had the weekends off and Sundays sucked because all the useful places tended to be closed._

_Though in all honesty, Dean couldn’t have cared less what day it was when he took the old, worn hunting knife and stabbed it through his brother’s heart._

_There really was no weather and no day of the week that was appropriate for the final act of giving up hope._

_There were no words to describe the moment afterwards; after Sam had fallen still for the first time in months or years or forever, when Dean didn’t know if he was relieved or happy or hating himself more than he ever did before. He felt the loss, though, that much needed no interpretation, even though there had been little left to lose._

_There was nothing inside him, underlined with empty rage and burning hatred, and finally, clear and defined, determination and defiance when Castiel appeared in the door and their eyes met for just one second before Dean lifted the murder weapon and slit his own throat._

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

“Don’t be a bitch, Sammy,” Dean says, his fingers drumming on the wheel of a stolen car in the rhythm of something by Metallica, as if the radio of this old thing was actually working. “It wasn’t even ten dollars.”

“It’s the principle of the matter.”

“Yeah, well, on principle, I’d say the world fucking owes us. It owes us a lot more than a crappy meal in a diner. How often did we save basically everyone? Did we get paid for it? No. The world will hardly profit from her saviours starving, so I’d say it’s only fair.”

“You’re not starving, Dean. I’m not starving.”

“So what? I wanted to eat. You didn’t bitch about it when we took the car, and that’s worth a lot more.”

“Yeah, but the car we _need_.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “And I needed food, for the happiness of my soul,” he says and starts humming to signal the end of the discussion, since there is no music to turn up. Sam accepts it, but he’s still looking pissed and probably won’t talk to Dean for the rest of the drive. It’s nice to know that some things don’t change.

Or rather, that they are back to the way they are supposed to be.

It begins to snow a couple of minutes later, the weather soon getting so bad that Dean is forced to slow down, even though an accident would be the least of their worries. He is, in fact, not quite sure what their worries are at this point, but he knows that as soon as they reached Bobby’s place, their old friend is going to give them plenty to worry about.

“Maybe we should call ahead,” Sam mutters after an hour or so. Dean glances over and sees the traces of his breath on the window he’s leaning against. It’s almost dark though it’s not that late yet.

“What for? It’s not like he’s going to shoot us if we appear unannounced.”

But that’s exactly what might happen. Getting shot would be even more likely if they warned Bobby, though. Which is exactly what Sam means: They should give the old man a chance to make up his mind on the whole shooting thing.

The tension between them isn’t just caused by Dean’s decision to dodge the bill in the diner. They don’t know what’s going to happen now. They don’t know anything.

Things could go downhill, without warning, very quickly. Things might already be going downhill and they just don’t know it yet.

It feels like a storm is following them, just beyond the horizon where they can’t see it.

“You think Bobby saved my car?” The thought comes over Dean suddenly and it’s kind of funny that it took him so long to think of this. His baby is his one and only and should have been the first thing on his mind when they got back. Feels like he’s fucking betraying her by not being worried sooner, and he’s overcome by horrible visions of her on some salvage yard that is not Bobby’s, waiting to be disassembled because Dean is the only one who loves her enough to go though all the trouble that’s fixing her.

Beside him, Sam shifts, trying to get comfortable on the unfamiliar seat. (Dean’s first thought upon coming back was Sam in his arms, Sam recognizing him, Sam recognizing reality, Sam being all the way with him and smiling and wide eyed and amazed and frightened, looking more alive than in forever and Sam Sam Sam. It’s no competition.) “I’m sure he got her home, if he could.”

And there’s that. That other reason why they did not call Bobby. They don’t know what became of him. Cas took Dean and Sam away to whatever place it was where he let them rot, but Bobby was not with them because Cas did not care about Bobby as much. So either he just left him behind, or he splattered him across the walls like he did Raphael. It’s not a possibility they have been willing to face yet.

Night is falling and the fading light adds to the air of approaching doom Dean hasn’t been able to shake off all day. Perhaps it just comes with their situation, this nervousness. Sam shifts again, looks out of the window, and doesn’t speak. Dean can’t stop glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, taking in the sight of his little brother sitting in this car and watching the world go by, the way he did from the passenger seat of the Impala all his life. He can’t get enough of that. For far too long he thought he’d never see this again.

He did the right thing. No matter how strong the feeling if impending doom is getting, he will never doubt that he did the right thing. How could it have been wrong if it’s given him this?

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

They arrive at the salvage yard a day later, just before sunset, in the bleak twilight of another winter day. The night they spend in a motel, using a stolen credit card. They checked in and then sat on the beds, facing each other without speaking. Neither of them tired, neither of them knowing why they were even there, just going through the motions. They left at dawn.

The ground of the Singer Salvage Yard is damp with half-molten snow, the gravel half-frozen. The Impala is the first thing Dean sees when he stops the stolen car. It’s standing closest to the house, the roof crushed, no work done yet. Waiting for him.

Bobby’s nowhere to be seen and they can’t knock on his door. There’s light in the window, though, so he’s home, alive and home. Probably looking out of the window at the unfamiliar car with a shotgun on standby. Dean smiles at the thought, but Sam frowns and looks tense.

There’s no other way but to show themselves, so they do. They leave the car at the same time and remain standing beside it, in full sight, waiting. Not getting closer to the house they can’t enter.

Bobby needs all of twenty seconds before he opens the door and comes out to them, the old wooden steps creaking beneath his weight. He’s having the “Thank God you’re alive!” expression on his face that Dean and Sam both have seen far too often in their lives and Dean finds himself grinning at him, suddenly happy, as if everything was going to be okay.

But Bobby slows down before he reaches them and something is lost from the expression on his face. He still comes closer, though, because even Sam is smiling at him and no one, not even a seasoned hunter, can keep up doubt when Sam Winchester is smiling.

“I’m damn glad to see you, boys,” Bobby says. This is the right moment for a hug so Dean steps over to wrap his arms around the older man. “Me too,” he assures him, and pretends not to notice Bobby flinching the moment he touches him.

“So, uhm,” Sam begins. He comes over to their side of the car just when Dean and Bobby part, and Bobby moves away a little too quickly and makes no move to hug Sam as well. “How long have we been gone?”

Bobby eyes him strangely. “You don’t know?”

“Time felt strange there,” Dean answers before Sam can say ‘No, I lost track of time because I was insane and every day was a hundred years in Hell and every gentle touch cut me like a knife and everyone was Lucifer about to rape me’. Which he probably wouldn’t have said anyway, but Dean’s not taking the risk of him even _thinking_ about it. “I don’t know where Cas took us, but I don’t think it was here. Heaven, maybe. Though it certainly didn’t feature paradise.”

“When did you get back?”

It’s damn hard to tell. “Couple of days ago?”

“And you didn’t think to watch the news? Listen to the radio? They do say the date every now and then.”

The radio of the car is a piece of shit that’s only spitting white noise and the TV in their motel room was broken. Yeah, how likely is that? Dean doesn’t even try to explain it. “Just give us a date, okay?”

“You’ve been gone for about two months. What, that comes as a surprise to you?” Bobby adds when he sees Dean and Sam exchange a look.

“Like I said, time felt strange. It sure felt a lot longer.”

“Well, you sure don’t look older than you should be.” Bobby’s looking mostly at Sam when he says that. “You’re looking good, boy,” he finally notes. “Much better than the last time I saw you. Cas fix that wall of yours?”

Dean nearly laughs there. But the sound that does escape his throat is something ugly and bitter.

Bobby frowns at him. “I guess not, then.”

“No, but I’m better. I’m fine.” That’s Sam, always trying to put everyone at ease. Dean just hopes he’s right. “I’m dealing, you know. Was rough for a while, but Dean…” He throws a quick glance in Dean’s direction. “Dean found a way to help me.”

Fuck you, Sam. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. ( _I love you so much._ )

“Well, that’s great,” Bobby says and sounds like he actually means it. “Now come in already. I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He turns to get back into his house, and he’s already down the hall when he realises that the brothers are no longer behind him. They remained standing on the porch, before the line of salt. “What’s going on?” he asks, slowly walking back to them, but not all the way, and Dean can hear it in his voice that he suspects the answer even before Sam swallows and says, “This is as far as we can go.”

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

_It wasn’t the first time Dean had died, far from it. The first time he had nearly died he had the seen the reaper coming for him, and he had seen him turn away and go after someone else. The next time he came close he actually met the reaper and she had tried to teach him something about letting go. The first time he died for real he had only seen hellhounds, and though he knows now that there should be a reaper every time to pick up the soul for its final journey, he hadn’t seen any, then. Not that he remembers. There was pain, and then there was more pain, so much worse pain, and meat hooks and forever and the first dawning understanding of what he had damned himself to, what he was facing. Perhaps reapers didn’t bother with lost souls because there was only one way to go anyway, no option of staying and therefore no reason to waste time on them._

_Or he just didn’t remember. He didn’t remember any reaper that other time he died either, when he woke up in Heaven one moment to the next and enjoyed one of the best moments of his youth before all too willingly letting his heart be torn to shreds (because really, it had been so easy to tell himself Sam didn’t love him since that made it so much easier to push him away – but even his self-esteem issues were no excuse for just accepting that apparently none of Sam’s most valued memories included the girl he’d wanted to fucking marry). This time, though, this time everything was as it had been when he had played Death. There was a brief pain, the familiar sensation of dying, and then there was a reaper. Not any reaper either, but Tessa, because apparently even reapers tended to be nostalgic._

_She was wearing the face he knew, and she looked at him with such sadness and disappointment in her eyes that Dean felt like falling as she said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”_

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Bobby looks heartbroken, but in the end not terribly surprised. He doesn’t shoot them. He breaks the salt line at the entrance and every other door in the house and lets them into his home, these creatures that might destroy him if they wanted, the way he has always let them in. Dean doesn’t know if he trusts them, or if this is a risk he’s willing to take for the sake of getting them back.

“So,” he says, standing in the kitchen while Dean and Sam settle down on the seats they have always chosen, ever since they were kids. Sam at the head of the table and Dean at the side, close enough to reach over to catch him should he fall. (They didn’t sit this close since Sam was five.) “I guess I don’t need to offer you dinner, then.”

“No,” Sam says, and at the same time Dean says, “If you got leftovers, I’ll take them,” making Sam pull a face on him while Bobby frowns. “You know,” Dean explains, “all those ghosts who don’t know they are dead? Who go around as solid as a living being, eating and drinking and sleeping? We’re kinda like that.”

“But you very obviously do know that you are dead,” Bobby observes.

“Yeah. I guess, I don’t know, I guess we just have the advantage of advanced knowledge on everything ghost-y.” Dean shrugs and reaches for a bag of chips on the counter behind him, tears it open and stuffs some into his mouth, to underline his argument. Sam rolls his eyes.

“Right.” The way Bobby stretches the word tells Dean that he’s not impressed with the explanation. “So, how did you end up this way? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see you, but this is not exactly the reunion I was hoping for.”

“I bet,” Dean mutters, and Sam hurries to say, “Cas killed us,” before Dean can explain what really happened. So Dean glares at his brother and Sam glares back and of course Bobby picks up on that because he’s not stupid.

“Did he? Why wait this long?”

“Who knows why he does anything he does? Maybe he just wanted us to bask in his glory.”

“And what kept you here? Something tells me you’re not just waiting to say goodbye.”

“What, you wish we’d rather moved on without ever telling you what happened to us?” Dean tries to keep his tone light. “Because I don’t think Cas would have send you a note.”

Bobby’s expression turns at the same time stern and soft. “You deserve better than this, boys.”

“Well.” Dean shifts uncomfortably. “Apparently, I-”

“We’d’ve gone to Hell,” Sam interrupts him. “Cas is ruling Heaven, do you really think he would have let us in? So since neither of us is all that interested in a repeated performance, we decided to stay here instead.” He looks at Bobby with an open challenge in his eyes, everything about him radiating defensiveness. “Or would you rather have us burn?”

“Of course not,” Bobby snaps. “And as long as you two knuckleheads can keep yourself from going vengeful, you’re welcome to stay here. But I know you, Sam. And the way you’re acting right now tells me there’s something you don’t want me to know.”

Of course he noticed that. It’s Bobby – Bobby knows them. Sam just kind of glares at him, so Bobby looks at Dean for an explanation. And the thing is, Dean wants him to know, wants his guilt to be acknowledged, but he won’t do that right here and now with Sam listening, because Sam doesn’t want Bobby to know and Dean owes him so fucking much.

He makes a vague gesture with his head that he hopes Bobby will interpret correctly as “I’ll tell you when we’re on our own,” even as he realises that the right moment might never come since he doesn’t have any inclination of letting Sam out of his sight anytime soon.

Bobby does give them some food in the end. Dean is the only one who eats, and he happily does so, pretending nothing is wrong. Sam is quiet – he has been quiet ever since, making Dean think that he took this harder than him, or that something is wrong. (He’s almost anxiously sticking to his big brother’s side, though, and Dean can very much live with that.) And Bobby is sitting before his own plate, not touching the food, watching them with an unreadable expression on his face. He’s taking this well, all things considered, but in the end he did just learn that his surrogate sons have died, which is an odd experience to make from the point of view of a surrogate son. Makes it hard for Dean to really appreciate what the old hunter is going through right now.

This is a very strange situation.

Eventually, they retreat to their old room upstairs, the one they used as children. Bobby gives them sheets and blankets and they make their beds but neither of them lies down to sleep, even long after Bobby has gone to bed. Once again they sit on their beds, worn and exhausted but not tired, not sure if they could sleep even if they wanted to.

Not wanting to sleep because they might just drift away.

Eventually, in the silvery moonlight falling in through the window, Dean reaches out for his brother. “Come here,” he whispers and Sam comes willingly, letting his brother take him in his arms as they sink down together, curled up and awake for the rest of the night.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

 _They were still in the room Dean had died in. The_ cell _he had died in. Bare walls, blankets on the floor for a bed, a high, tiny window with fucking bars in it, and outside it was always dark. Just black, like there was nothing. A parody of a prison cell created for their convenience, or a picture drawn by a child with only a vague idea of what a prison cell looked like and very little imagination._

_But the door, usually closed unless it was time for their punishment, was open, frozen the moment Dean had ended it, and it was empty because Cas, for all his power, could not reach them here. The light was different, too. It was no longer the dim, yellow light that filled the cell all the time, all the fucking time, making Dean want to rip his skin off. It had been replaced with the colourless kind of twilight he remembered from his second adventure as a ghost, when he and Sam had stripped their bodies in order to save a reaper. The same reaper who was now looking at him with such hard eyes._

_But Dean’s own eyes had something much more important to focus on than Tessa: Behind her, looking lost and confused but so fucking_ aware _was Sam, his eyes wide and looking at Dean as if his big brother had all the answers. And Dean just kind of gravitated toward him just like Sam moved for Dean, both of them equally eager to wrap their arms around the other and just hold on. But before they could touch, Tessa put her hand flat against Dean’s chest, stopping him with the efficiency of a wall. At the same time, a hand took hold of Sam’s shoulder and pulled him back, making Sam flinch and Dean struggle to get there and get it off his brother, but Tessa wouldn’t let him go._

_Sam looked at Dean in confusion and growing desperation. There was a guy standing behind him: Tall, middle-aged, bearded, black suit and tie. A reaper if Dean had ever seen one. “What the fuck, Tessa?” he snapped at his own reaper. “Let me get to my brother!”_

_“You can’t get to your brother!” Tessa didn’t exactly snap, but she did sound somewhat like a disappointed mother. Or a heartbroken mother. “You can’t get to your brother ever again.”_

  __

__+|+|+

 

 

There’s a ghost in the window of a two-storey building to the left. It’s barely visible even on this plane, wouldn’t have any hope of being seen, let alone passing for a real person, in the realm of the living. It hushes away when Dean notices it, as if afraid. Or plotting something. He’ll tell Bobby about it when they get back, have him take care of it before it hurts anyone. Dean wonders if that makes him a hypocrite.

Maybe it’s just lost and needs help moving on. But Dean and Sam are hardly the go-to guys for getting into Heaven.

“I told Bobby.” These are the first words Dean has spoken in ages; they leave his mouth almost unbidden but this is not one of the secrets that have to be carried in silence. Sam doesn’t even stop, doesn’t say anything. He just turns to look at his brother as they walk down the empty road that has no sound, no smell and no wind. Dean looks back and shrugs. “So you can stop with the lying when it comes up.”

“Why did you do that?” To Dean’s relief, Sam doesn’t sound too pissed. Just a little, and a little confused and a little tired. Dean would tell him to take a nap but they don’t technically need sleep anymore and while they never spoke about it, neither of them is entirely sure they wouldn’t drift somewhere else without their consciousness to root them where they are.

“Why not? It’s not a secret worth keeping. Don’t you think he deserves knowing how we ended up like this?”

“I think this is about you trying to punish yourself again,” Sam bluntly tells him. “You don’t want Bobby to see you as anything better than what you are.”

“So you do think that it was a shitty thing to do.”

“No. But I know you think that. And I bet that you told it exactly like that.”

There’s nothing much Dean can reply to that, since Sam got it exactly right. They just know each other too well. “Well, it _was_ a shitty thing to do. You could be-”

“I’m exactly where I want to be,” Sam interrupts him and Dean almost (but not quite) jumps when his brother gabs his hand without warning and holds it tight. “With you.”

For a moment they stand still, looking at each other. Eventually, Dean clears his throat and pulls back his hand. “Didn’t we have a rule against chick-flick moments? That didn’t die with us.”

“ _You_ had a rule against chick-flick moments,” Sam points out. “And you sucked at keeping to it.”

They keep on walking. There’s nowhere in particular they are going; they are merely taking a walk. Sam started walking and Dean came along and as they walk, even now, their hands are just barely touching.

It’s not often that they willingly return to this plane. Both Dean and Sam are fully aware that they no longer have a place in the world of the living; they feel like they are working on borrowed time and maybe by slipping down to the plane that is more appropriate for them they feel like giving up the place they have taken for themselves. Like they won’t be let in once they left for a minute.

How should Dean know? It’s not like they ever talked about it and thinking about stuff like that is something he takes great pains to avoid.

The thing is, it feels good being here. Like there’s a tension in him all the fucking time that he doesn’t even notice and now he’s here, where he belongs, he notices its absence. Like he can relax for the first time in ages. He’s pretty sure Sam feels the same way.

And that scares him shitless.

“We should get back up,” he therefore says. Maybe it’s bad, staying here for too long. Maybe at some point they won’t _want_ to get back.

“Up?” Sam frowns at him. “That’ll go over well. There are actually people in this street, Dean.”

Dean calls it “up” because being here reminds him of being underwater, not because it gets him one step closer to his final destination.

“It’s not like we never materialized on some sidewalk before. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that people ignore what they can’t explain.”

“Or Cas had some in-build perception-filter whenever he flew us somewhere.”

And, yeah, that is something Dean really likes to get nostalgic about, thanks. “We can get back to Bobby’s and pop up in his living room if that makes you feel better.”

“I found us a hunt.”

So there’s something that makes Dean stop in his tracks. “You what?”

“I read the paper, Dean. I recommend that, in general.”

“Sorry, I thought I heard something about a hunt right there. All this being dead and a friggin’ ghost must be interfering with my hearing. Maybe someone in the real world was just throwing salt through me when you opened your mouth.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “We’re not gonna go ghost hunting if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Right. We’re not gonna go hunting at all. Or did it escape you that _we are the things hunters hunt_?”

“We’re also hunters,” Sam apparently deems necessary to remind him.

“No, Sam. We’re friggin’ ghosts!”

“We know how to handle a job and we know how to pass for living people. And I’m not saying we go out there and mingle with the rest of the hunting community. I’m saying there’s a hunt, a wendigo, in Michigan. And Bobby saw the same article in the same paper, and he’s going to go take care of it because there aren’t many others left he could send, right? And hunting a wenidgo-”

“…is a two-man-job,” Dean finishes for him, biting his lip. “I hate you.”

“No, you don-” This time Sam stops himself, turning around to stare down the road behind them. Dean turns as well, sees nothing.

“What is it?” he asks, alarmed, but Sam shakes his head, turns back around.

“Nothing. I thought I heard something.”

“There’s no ‘I thought’ in our job! It’s usually something out to gank you!”

“There’s nothing, Dean. My imagination. It happens.” Sam seems unwilling to discuss this, but he’s turned around and is heading back to Bobby’s in order to pop out of thin air in the man’s kitchen, so Dean counts that as a win anyway. He’s quite concerned by the way Sam seems so very willing to write this off as his imagination going wild without even considering the possibility that it’s something else.

And by the way his brother is so tense on the way back, as if it cost him a lot of effort not to look over his shoulder.

 

 

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They do hunt the wendigo, and it goes well. It goes awesomely. Dean’s always hated hunting wendigos because they are tough sons of bitches: crafty, quick, strong, and equipped with a little too much human intelligence for his liking. It also doesn’t help that they have centuries of experience in hunting and while you try to trap them, they will try to trap you right back if they know you’re coming. In other words, hunting wendigos is fucking dangerous and not something he’d ever have thought he’d enjoy.

‘Enjoy’, of course, is too strong a word. The hunt still made him nervous and tense and a wendigo would not have been his first choice of a sparring partner when getting back in business, but it wasn’t like it could kill them, and that helped a lot. Also, starting with an easy salt-and-burn was out of the question for obvious reasons, and wendigos have the added advantage of being entirely unimpressed by salt, iron, or any other stuff ghosts, on principle, can’t handle.

This time, for maybe the first time ever when facing one of these monsters, the hunters were having a definite advantage. For one, though they can be solid enough if they want to be, they apparently don’t smell – so they didn’t have to wait for the right wind but could go right in. Actually, all they had to do was wait until the wendigo was in his cave, corner it and finish the job.

Naturally, Sam had to hurt himself doing so, which is quite an accomplishment considering he’s dead and all, but maybe also a consequence of that. They didn’t go in as carefully as they would have while alive. Both of them had flare guns, but when they were about to fire, the wendigo jumped forward in a show of fear Dean wasn’t used to from these things. It managed to knock the gun out of his hands and lunged for Sammy, and Sammy should just have flickered out of existence or maybe just become a little less material, but then he wouldn’t have been able to hold the flare gun and shoot and so the monster’s claws went straight through him.

And not through him the way Dean’s arm used to the first time they played ghosts (but strangely doesn’t anymore) but straight through him the way sharp claws run through flesh and muscle. Sam yelled in pain and Dean yelled in fear for Sam and the wendigo screeched because it was busting into flames the same moment Sam’s blood splattered across the wall of the cave.

Okay, so that was the part that hadn’t been fun at all.

Sam had kind of swayed on his feet afterwards and then sunken to his knees in a way much too similar to Cold Oak (and if it’s not redundant to worry about that now, Dean doesn’t know what is) and Dean had run over to him, held him, his hands all over his brother’s body. But there had been no wound, even as Sam winced. All the blood was already gone. “I guess my body simply remembered that it doesn’t exist anymore,” was the explanation Sam later came up with, when they made their way back to the car.

Afterwards they went for burgers and even Sam ate something without bitching. They tried to report back to Bobby from the first public phone they found, but the reception was terrible, only white noise instead of voices. So they gave up and made their way back, taking their time. Bobby wouldn’t worry. And Dean and Sam had all the time in the world.

 

 

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_“I’m sorry,” Tessa said, for the first time with something like regret. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”_

_Dean was still looking at Sam, held back by the reaper in his back and looking so helpless. “What are you talking about? We’re both dead, right? And we’re soul mates or some such bullshit. We’re meant to be together!”_

_“You were,” Tessa confirms. “But that only means you get to share a Heaven if you both end up in Heaven. You and Sam are headed in different directions, Dean. You can’t stay together. You won’t be together ever again.”_

_There’s understanding in Sam’s eyes now, and naked fear. “No!” Dean shouts, throwing himself forward only to be held back with seemingly no effort at all. “He did his time in Hell! He didn’t even deserve to go there in the first place. He never meant to start the apocalypse, and don’t you dare tell me something about good intention paving the road to Hell! Even so, does his sacrifice count for nothing?” Tessa shook her head, opened her mouth, but Dean interrupted her. “Don’t tell me he damned himself with something he did when he was soulless! How can you damn a soul with something that happened when it wasn’t even present?”_

_“Calm down, Dean,” Tessa snapped with a glare that softened only seconds later into a look of vague sadness and sympathy. “It’s not Sam who’s going to Hell. It’s you.”_

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

They need two days to get back to South Dakota, because while the hunt was in Michigan, it was up in the utmost north corner of Michigan. Actually, Dean’s half-convinced that they crossed the border to Canada at least twice on their way to the wendigo’s cave. And there are only back roads in the area, curvy and steep. No chance to drive very fast. So they take their time, make a few stops. They are both in good spirits and Sam’s laugh sounds so wonderful Dean wants to kiss him. His smile is so bright it nearly blinds his brother to the dark circles under his eyes.

Dean is so used to seeing them. He only needs to close his eyes to see Sammy’s face, pale and gaunt, his eyes red-rimmed and focused on something Dean can’t see. Never on him. Never closing in sleep. Sam went so long without finding any kind of rest in his final months that Dean is convinced Cas kept him alive with his new God-powers. The human body isn’t meant to survive sleep deprivation of that magnitude.

He’s starting to look like that again, and at some point Dean can no longer ignore that. It confuses him, though. They don’t need sleep anymore. Sam shouldn’t be tired.

But Sam’s also in a good mood, as if the hunt changed something, and Dean doesn’t want to worry. He just wants to enjoy this. They take detours on the way back, to enjoy the scenery. They hit a bar filled with cigarette smoke and a barkeeper who keeps cursing as he hits the small television under the ceiling that refuses to show more than wildly flickering images. Dean hustles pool just for the heck of it, and the guys he plays against kind of despise him despite his charming attitude, so they are extra willing to hand him his ass. They are also extra pissed when they lose but surprisingly enough don’t make a scene but just fuck off. Sam watches from the table, nursing a beer but hardly drinking any of it. After the game, Dean sits with him, kicking him under the table. “You drink like a pussy,” he scolds. “You’re making me look bad just by being associated with you.”

“Dude.” Sam shakes his head when Dean grabs his bottle and empties it to prove a point. “You can’t even get drunk anymore.”

“Wanna bet?”

“Seriously. You don’t have a body.”

“But the beer doesn’t know that. And it’s not exactly dripping through me, is it?” He looks down just to make sure, since that would be embarrassing.

“My point. I mean, what happens to the stuff we consume? Technically, it can’t be staying inside us. We don’t digest anymore, and yet we’re not swelling the more we eat or drink. Also, it’s material and we’re not, technically speaking. And we shouldn’t be able to take it with us when we do the ghost thing and flicker out of existence.”

Sam’s habit of overthinking everything can be so annoying. Especially since it has got Dean thinking as well, and he’s thinking of undigested food and beer splashing to the ground when they give up being material. Kind of disgusting, really.

“We vaporize everything inside us with our awesome ghost-powers!” he decides. “It gets inside us and ceases to exist.”

Sam gives him a look. It’s his patented I May Be Younger Than You But I Have Been Your Mental Superior Since I Was Three look.

“Think about it!” Dean is starting to like the thought. “We could end all risk of atomic wars by eating the missiles.”

“There’s it’s more likely that all our food magically gets transported somewhere else.”

“Like?”

“Like our corpses, for instance.”

Dean winces. That’s not a thought he appreciates. “I’m pretty sure Cas vaporized those.”

“You sure? Maybe he keeps them around. I’ve been thinking, anyway. With his powers he could bring us back to life anytime he wants.”

There goes Dean’s good mood. “Why would he do that?”

“Why does Cas do anything right now? Maybe at some point he’ll get bored and feel like it. Maybe he thinks we haven’t suffered enough yet.”

Yeah, seriously, why is Sam doing that? “If he had wanted to, he would have done it already.”

Dean tries to distract himself, and his brother, by turning his attention to the pretty girl behind the counter of the bar and throwing her a very obvious flirty smile. She smiles back, but it lack’s conviction. Then she looks somewhere else, but Dean keeps catching her glancing over to them every few seconds. She doesn’t look interested, though. She looks unsure and confused.

It’s okay, though. He wasn’t going to get serious here – after all, he’s dead, and that would have been seriously awkward if she ever found out. The thought is followed by the thought of preservation. What if she didn’t take the pill and the condom broke? Was it possible to get impregnated by ghost-sperm? Would she then give birth to a half-alive, half-immaterial baby? Would her womb become haunted? How do you exorcise a haunted womb?

“Dean.” Sam kicks him under the table to get his attention. “You have a seriously creepy expression on your face right now.”

“I’ve been thinking about haunted wombs.”

Sam screws up his face in a disgusted grimace. “I don’t even want to know.”

“Neither do I,” Dean decides. “Let’s get out of here. I made good money tonight. We can get a room and have a boys’ night with bad pizza and bad movies and beer, all without having to worry about Bobby waking up.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sam agrees, proving that they are related after all. As they leave, Dean slaps his brother’s back and proclaims, “And I will show you that ghosts can get drunk after all!”

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

They leave some of Dean’s hard-earned notes on the table when they go, if only because they don’t want to attract attention and because Sam won’t let Dean flicker into ghost-land and finally test his theory of whether or not they can actually walk through solid walls. Not here, he says – they’re going to spend the night in the area, after all, and the last thing they need is a local hunter coming after their asses.

So they pay, and they get a room in the only motel in town, a slightly run-down but surprisingly comfortable two-storey building. Their room is on the second floor, right beside the vacancy sign. Fortunately, the lower half of the glowing letters, the part right in front of their window, is broken, so the light isn’t too annoying. Dean suspects that they’ve been broken on purpose by someone trying to sleep in here.

Then he remembers that sleep isn’t what they are here for. It’s odd, how they still gravitate towards these places even though they don’t need them anymore.

Sadly, the TV is a piece of shit. So is the reception in the entire area. Dean tries to call Bobby again from the phone at the reception, but there are only weird noises on the line. He says something anyway, hoping maybe Bobby might hear him, and has the reception guy order them their pizza since he keeps insisting that the phone works perfectly fine. Amazingly enough, pizza arrives fifteen minutes later, and for lack of any bad movie to watch, Dean and Sam jump around on their wonderfully bouncy beds and throw pillows at each other.

If there’s anyone next door, they probably think they are having sex in here. The realization makes Dean jump in a sex-rhythm, and as soon as Sam realizes what he’s doing he jumps over to Dean’s bad and tries to smother him with a pillow.

They gabble on the bed, bouncing even more in their fight for dominance, and wow, that doesn’t really help, does it? There are yelled insults and Sam evilly abusing the knowledge he has of Dean’s weak spots by ticking him in the right places to make his limbs turn to jelly as he gasps for air (it’s just this one spot right beneath his rips that has to be touched just like that), yet somehow they end up with Dean lying on top of Sam, pinning him to the mattress. Their laughter dies down and in its wake they are looking into each other’s faces, redundant breathing brushing redundant skin until Dean quietly says, “Go to sleep, little brother. I’ll make sure you won’t fade away.”

It proves how exhausted Sam really is when he just accepts the words. He doesn’t say anything back, he doesn’t nod or shake his head or anything. He just holds Dean’s gaze for another few seconds and then he lets his eyes drift shut, Dean still pinning his wrists beside his head, his weight covering his brother like a blanket.

After all this time, Sam still trusts him this much. Unconditionally. Sometimes, Dean feels suffocated by how much he loves this boy.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Sam doesn’t fade away. It’s much, much worse.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

The nightmares start after barely an hour. Dean watches from the other bed as Sam starts to twitch and shift. He waits for him to start flickering, to lose his hold on this world, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Sam suddenly arches and screams, and his fingers claw at the covers he’s lying on.

Dean’s over with him within seconds. He shakes Sam to no avail, takes his wrists to hold his hands still and that’s when he notices the blood. Sam’s nails are gone. Broken off or torn out, still sticking in the covers of the bed. On three fingers the skin is missing down to the bone and Dean doesn’t understand, doesn’t get what is happening.

Sam screams in terror and pain and blood spreads red under his shirt. Dean doesn’t understand but he knows that he has to wake his brother, has to make this stop. He yells and shakes Sam hard, harder, feels bones break like twigs under his hand and Sam’s screams become gurgling sounds and coughs as he begins to suffocate on the blood in this throat. But the shaking helps, the shaking has the desired effect, because Sam opens his eyes and Dean finds only empty and bloody sockets under his lids.

(Someone next door is banging against the wall, yelling for them to shut up.)

“Shh, Sammy,” Dean whispers, pulling his sobbing, chocking brother close. “Oh God, oh Sammy, shh. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.” He presses him against his chest, holds him so close that he doesn’t have to see (only feel the blood soaking through his clothes) and rocks back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Eventually, Sam falls still. Eventually, Dean stops rocking and Sam pushes away from him with his bloody but unharmed hands, lifts his head so Dean can see the blood on his chin that is no longer followed by new blood. He blinks and looks at his brother through tired eyes.

They’re ghosts. Their physical manifestation is based only on their self-image and belief. Sam dreamt of being taken apart. It makes sense. This was a stupid idea. It makes so much fucking sense.

They don’t try the sleeping thing again.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

The next morning, they leave at dawn, both of them eager to get back to Bobby’s place and the sense of security it offers. As they leave the room Sam lingers in the doorway, looking back as if searching for something. He shakes himself and turns away before Dean can ask, closing the door with an audible click and determination.

They don’t speak a single word all the way back to Sioux Falls.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

_“No.”_

_Sam’s voice reached Dean as if from a far distance. He looked over at his brother and felt relief because no matter what, Sam was not going to Hell. That was what mattered. The only thing that_ should _matter – more than the fear that washed over Dean at the prospect of going back, and more than the soul-deep terror that came with the knowledge that he wasn’t going to see his brother again._

_He wasn’t going to see his brother again. The reapers would take them in different directions and they would never be together again. Never._

_Never._

_Going to Hell didn’t matter._

_“Why?” he heard himself asking. “How does that even make sense? I’ve been to Hell. I know what kind of deeds get you there. And somehow I don’t see how I fit the bill.”_

_“The rules have changed,” Tessa told him, and the way she said it made clear she wasn’t happy about it. “Heaven is under new management now, and the new management has decided that you can’t get into it.”_

_“Cas can’t do that!” Dean protested, though he had seen often enough in the final chapter of his life that there were a hell lot of things he had thought that Cas couldn’t do that he could, and did. “There have to be rules to prevent this kind of thing.”_

_“There are, yes. Under normal circumstance Castiel could not have denied you access to paradise. But these aren’t normal circumstances. You committed fratricide and suicide, Dean. You gave him an_ excuse _.”_

_“But he did that to help me!” Sam protested. He was fighting against his reaper now and the guy was looking impatient and this was supposed to be the last time Dean ever saw him: being pulled away from him against his will._

_“It doesn’t matter,” Tessa said, a lot more gently than when she was talking to Dean. “Castiel is ruling Heaven and he can bend the rules to his liking. You two are special cases because he wants you punished. He will not give you any more than he absolutely has to.”_

_“But that’s not-” Sam was interrupted by the reaper’s hand on his arm. He turned to stare at the guy and then at Dean with a look of understanding and horror on his face. And Dean knew what that meant, even before Tessa touched his own shoulder and said, “We have to go now.”_

_“Wait!” Dean didn’t move, but he felt compelled to. Tessa didn’t even touch him anymore and yet she was pulling him along as she walked away. “Don’t we get a choice? We can always stay here!”_

_“Not you, Dean. You got yourself an express ticket to Hell, and I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”_

_“Then don’t deliver me!”_

_“I can’t do that. You know that as well as I do.”_

_Yes, Dean did. But he didn’t care. Sam’s reaper was walking away in the opposite direction and Sam threw his brother a look of such desperation that Dean knew he couldn’t leave him. It was simply out of the question._

_He didn’t think. He just knew that he had to reach Sammy, had to be with him. Taking a step in the wrong direction, the one he was not supposed to go was hard, so hard, but he did it, and Sam did the same, came a step closer. It was as if a strong wind was trying to blow them away, but Dean fought, and in the end it stood no chance against his love for his brother. No force in the world did, not even something as inevitable as death._

_It got harder with every step and at some point the male reaper said, “You can’t do this!” and Tessa said, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Stop this!” but Dean reached out with arms that felt like lead and his fingers brushed Sam’s, then grabbed them, and then they pulled each other close and held on as the storm blew around them._

_Heaven and Hell had tried to separate them before but Dean would not let his brother be taken from him. The storm passed and when they looked up they were alone, standing on an empty street somewhere on earth and had nothing but each other._

_It was a long time before they broke their embrace._


	2. Chapter 2

Bobby’s not there when they reach the salvage yard, and somehow, that feels like another blow. He’s probably just gone to the shop, or took up another hunt, but for some reason the brothers feel abandoned and lost in the empty house, unsure what to do.

They are dead and things aren’t going to get better. Usually, people think that the deceased have left all bad stuff behind them. It’s a pretty illusion Sam always hated having to destroy.

At least Bobby didn’t redo the ghost-protection, so they know they are still welcome. “He could have called,” Dean growls as he flops down on the couch and Sam refrains from pointing out to him why that would have been out of the question even if they still had cells.

He doesn’t say anything himself. The house feels dead without Bobby in it. After a minute, he can’t bear being inside anymore and finds himself in the backyard, needing the feeling of the air on his skin. There are birds singing in the trees; just one or two, but enough to tell him that this is the world of the living. They are still here.

His palms press against the hood of an old Volvo and he braces himself against the car, taking deep breaths. He feels like screaming, like running.

A hand runs down his spine and he freezes.

It’s not Dean’s hand; this is not the way Dean touches him. The hand is joined by another, resting on his hips, then both moving forward to close around his middle. Sam can’t breathe. The weight of a too-cold body presses against his back and just when he hears the intake of breath right beside his ear that comes before words being spoken, he squirms out of the grip, turns around and finds himself looking at nothing.

Desperately, he tries to calm his wildly beating heart. He knows this wasn’t real. (But he knew that as well when he was seeing things in Castiel’s prison and that didn’t do anything to help him until in the end he forgot.)

This was supposed to be _over_.

“You need to come with me, Sam.”

Sam flinches at the sound of a woman’s voice, but this time, there really is someone standing between the car wrecks, slowly coming closer. It’s Tessa, the reaper. Instinctively, Sam takes a step back and is stopped by the car.

She seems to be real, but that isn’t helping in this case.

“How can I even see you?” he wonders. “This is the material world.”

“Yes, but you aren’t any more alive than I am. Less, in fact, because I was never, in your sense of the term, alive in the first place.” She stops, seeing that Sam’s not reacting too well to her presence. “This is no place for you, Sam. You can’t stay.”

“I guess that goes for any ghost. We’re not leaving. Not as long as Dean is going to Hell.”

“This isn’t about Dean,” Tessa tells him. “This is just about you. Because if you don’t come with me, to Heaven, where you belong, you are going to Hell, Sam. And there is nothing anyone could do about it. It’s not a choice.”

Even as he shakes his head, Sam knows that she is right. He can feel it, can feel himself slipping. He’s hanging on to this world and his brother with all he has but Hell is bleeding through the memories that are part of his soul and sooner or later he’ll lose his grip and he’ll _fall_ –

“Is that true?” That’s Dean, and damn, he’s not supposed to hear this, he’s not supposed to know. Sam knows what will come now, because his brother is a stupid, selfless asshole.

First, Dean comes closer, his wide eyed-stare fixed on Sam. Not on Tessa. He knows where to look for answers, already suspects Sam of not being honest with him. But Sam’s shaking his head, searching for words, and it’s Tessa who says, “I’m sorry, Dean. You can’t keep him.”

“I’m talking to my brother!” Dean snaps. “Sam, is that true? Is it that bad?”

But Sam’s looking at Tessa. “I’m not leaving him.”

“You will, Sam. You can’t stay for long, so it’s Heaven or Hell, but you’re leaving your brother behind ether way. Don’t you understand?” She turns to Dean. “If Sam doesn’t accompany me to Heaven, he will end up in Hell, tortured for eternity. This is his only chance.”

This time, Sam is speaking directly to Dean. “I’m not leaving you.”

“The fuck you are!” Dean’s yelling now, as Sam knew he would. “I won’t let you go to Hell, Sammy! Not for me. Not _because of_ me! I should never have kept you here in the first place.”

“That was my decision as well and I stand by it!” Sam snaps back. “How long do you think you can stay here without me, huh? Do you think I’m gonna let you go to Hell any more than you me?”

“Yes, I am! I’m the one Hell bound, so it’s my decision. Tessa, you take him.”

“I can’t,” the reaper helpfully provides and Sam almost breathes a sigh of relief. “He’ll have to come willingly.”

“And I won’t.” Sam crosses his arms before his chest, leans back against the car.

“Don’t be an ass! You’re not helping me with this. Do you think I get to stay here any longer with you in Hell than with you in Heaven? I’m gonna end up there anyway. The only difference is that in one case I’ll have the comforting knowledge of you being save and happy and in the other case I’ll get extra torture from knowing that you’re down there as well and it’s my fault.”

“Don’t be a fucking martyr about it. This isn’t your fault, it’s me being selfish. How happy do you think I would be in Heaven knowing you’re burning in Hell? I might not be able to save you from going down, but at least we’re going together.” Sam turns back to the reaper in waiting. “Thank you for the warning. I’m staying.”

She sighs, nods, and disappears. The next moment, Dean’s fist collides with Sam’s cheek.

“How can you be so unbelievably stupid?” he growls with tears in his eyes before turning away to stalk back to the house. He doesn’t make it halfway there before he turns back, comes over to Sam and pulls him into an embrace that knocks the air right out of is brother. “I hate you so fucking much,” he whispers.

 

 

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When Bobby comes back that evening, he notices that something happened right away, knowing them far too well not to pick up the signs – the biggest of which is Dean sitting on the couch with Sam held securely in his arms.

“What’s wrong? You look like someone’s dancing a flamenco on your graves.” Which is a silly thing to say since they don’t have graves. Or maybe they do, and Cas is dancing a flamenco on them right now. Dean tries not to imagine that.

Sam doesn’t move or give any indication of having noticed their old friend’s return, so Dean sighs and tells Bobby about Tessa’s visit and her less-than-optimistic prognosis. When he’s done, Bobby rubs thumb and index finger of his hand over his eyes and goes to get beers for all of them.

Dean and Sam finally separate to accept them and Dean can tell Bobby appreciates that. Their sudden physical closeness must be worrying him – they’re not usually the cuddly types unless one of them recently died.

Which kind of excuses them for the rest of forever.

“So, Sam’s soul is threatening to fall into Hell,” Bobby sums up. “Okay. I get that. But why would you have to go there if Sam’s not here anymore, Dean? Sam could get to safety and you’d just stay here. You might not be able to see each other again, but would that really be worse than going to Hell?”

So maybe he doesn’t know them so well after all. Still, Dean would make that sacrifice if it meant that Sam got away, but that’s not how it works. He and Sam, they never talked about it, but they both feel it: there’s a bond between them that anchors them, helps then hang on to this world because they hang on to each other. Dean feels the loss whenever Sam flickers a level deeper without him or even if he’s more than a dozen yards away. Without Sam by his side, it get’s harder to ignore the fact that he’s not meant to be part of this world anymore, and he has no illusions about his ability to stay once Sam is gone and out of reach for good.

“That’s not how it works,” Sam says tiredly. “We need each other. Might have something to do with the soul mates thing.”

This gets them raised eyebrows. “Soul mates?”

“It’s a long story. What it comes down to is that we’re not really supposed to separate.”

“Well, if that ain’t touching. But the point remains that right now you’re both bound for Hell together. Am I the only one who thinks we need to do something about that?”

“No. But as it happens, I am the only one who _can_ do something about it.”

Dean turns to Sam, feeling a sudden rush of hope because that sounds like a plan. The emotion dies when he sees the awkward little smile on his brother’s face. “I could simply not give in,” Sam tells him. “I can fight this. Getting a hang on it already. And as long as I do, no one’s going anywhere.”

Dean stares at him, then shares a look with Bobby. This is hardly the best plan ever. But then, they once before depended on Sam’s willpower because there was nothing else that could have helped them and it ended up saving the world. Maybe this time it can save them for a change.

If Dean manages to ignore the way Sam flinches sometimes, shies away from food or turns to look at things that aren’t there, he might even make himself believe that.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Not long after Tessa’s visit, they discover that going to Hell isn’t the only thing that they have to worry about. There is, it turns out, also the risk of being sent there by someone else.

It happens completely out of the blue. Dean and Sam are in a bar in Sioux Falls, playing pool against each other and doing their best to relax and pretend they’re not dead when suddenly someone takes hold of Dean’s shoulder from behind.

“Hey, aren’t you John Winchester’s boys?” an unknown voice asks and Dean knows they are in trouble before he even turns around.

There are two of them, dressed in plaid shirts and baseball caps. Their dress code would give them away even if dad had know any people who weren’t either hunters or chicks very grateful for having been saved.

“Who wants to know?” Dean throws a glance at Sam who stands waiting and tense. Another guy, this one without cap but with beard, is standing a few feet behind him, his stance ridiculously casual.

“We used to work with your dad now and then,” the one in front of Dean answers.

“I don’t know you.” Dean turns away, signals Sam to grab his coat and make for the exit. He can tell these men aren’t out for small talk.

“Yeah, you were just tiny squints back then. John used to keep you out of the way. But you two made a name for yourselves since then. Quite a big name.”

“Also heard you’re dead,” the one behind him adds and Dean fights the urge to just flicker out of existence to where they can’t follow them.

“As you can see, rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.” He gives them his most charming fake smile and hopes they won’t throw salt at them.

“That’s quite interesting. Because, you see, my friend Walt told me that he and his buddy shot you. And that you were very dead afterwards.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a funny story,” Dean grins, even as he’s cursing internally. He should have taken the time to hunt Roy and Walt down and kill them like he promised. “You see, we’re actually zombies now. But you’re lucky – we already ate.”

It’s a good idea to leave now, because this could go bad very quickly. Without even looking at each other, Dean and Sam aim for the exit, trying to not make it look too much like an escape. They make it to the door and to Dean’s surprise and relief the others don’t follow them out. He would like to flicker into Ghost Town now, but there are people around, even though it’s late. They’ll have to wait until they reach the mostly abandoned road that leads to Bobby’s salvage yard.

What a terrible idea not to take the car tonight, but Sam felt like walking and Dean will do what Sam feels like because Sam’s wellbeing is what keeps them safe. (Naturally, that doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to bitch about it.)

Now Sam’s throwing him a frown of disapproval. Dean scowls. “What?”

“They’re hunters, Dean. Do you really think telling them we’re zombies was a brilliant idea?”

“Oh, come on! Like any zombie would say he’s a zombie to a hunter. If we’re lucky they’ll just write us off as assholes and give up.”

“When have we ever been lucky?” Sam growls, like the fifteen-years-old he secretly is. Dean slaps his shoulder and grins but doesn’t feel as confident as he’s acting. Running into hunters was bad enough. Running into hunters who know about at least one time they died is even worse.

It’s a half-hour’s walk to Bobby’s and they are fully prepared to switch down to the hunter-free eternal twilight of the astral plane once they are out of the light of the street lamps. Unfortunately, they don’t quite make it that far before someone calls “Winchester!” behind them. Close behind them. Dean and Sam turn around to see the guys from before hurrying towards them, each of them holding a machete in hand.

“Oh, come on!” Dean groans. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re not fucking vampires!”

“Since we don’t have your coffins at hand to nail you into them, we have to improvise,” the guy without baseball cap explains. “As former hunters, I suppose you’ll understand that.”

“You didn’t really believe him when he said we were zombies, right?” Sam asks, taking a step back. Nice to know that his survival instincts are still working. “How many zombies did you have a coherent conversation with, so far?”

“Dunno,” the one who seems to be their leader says with a shrug. He lifts his machete, and Dean wishes he had a gun so he could shoot him for being a moron. “But I believe Walt when he says he shot you close range and I’m not gonna take any chances.”

“How does that even-”

There is brief pain, then nothing. Dean blinks and finds himself in twilight, facing the empty road. He’s alone for all of a second or two before Sam shows up beside him, stumbling a step forward, his hands instinctively flying to his throat. For a moment he looks disoriented and lost, then his eyes find Dean and as he straightens himself he’s already glaring at his brother.

“For the record, _I told you_ we should take the car!” Dean hurries to say to fight the oncoming accusation that this is all, in fact, his fault. “Now, let’s get back to Bobby. Guess he’d better hear it from us than from them.”

 

 

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“Would you two idjits care to explain why I just got a call from a very agitated hunter who warned me that you two came back as a new kind of monster and are out to hunt my ass?” are the words Bobby greets them with the moment they open his front door. He’s glaring at them, the phone still in his hand, and Dean winces. Sam was right: when have they ever been lucky?

“That was totally not our fault,” he opens the defence.

“Actually, it was Dean’s fault.”

Dean glares at his brother. Great, Sam. What a loyal little brother you are.

Bobby gives them a wary sigh and a “Do I want to know?”

“They approached us in a bar. Apparently one of them was friends with Walt and Roy, who shot us a couple of years back.”

“Yeah, I know that. Because they mentioned it when they called to warn me that they had seen two hunters in my neighbourhood they know for a fact are dead. So they ran into you and then…?”

“And then Dean told them we were zombies.”

Bobby rolls his eyes with a groan and Dean stomps on his brother’s foot. “It wasn’t like that!”

“What, you didn’t tell them you were zombies?”

“I didn’t think they’d believe us. Who believes that kind of bullshit?”

“Hunters,” Sam and Bobby say at the same time, and isn’t this just great? Even their voices have ganged up on Dean.

“In Dean’s defence, they weren’t the brightest guys in the field,” Sam then tries to make up for it. “They’d probably have killed us even if we were perfectly alive.”

“Which, it has to be mentioned, you aren’t.” Bobby finally puts down the phone and reaches for a beer. “Dammit, Boys. You’re dead and I _still_ have to worry about you?”

The words are unexpectedly touching, considering Bobby is pissed at them. “You don’t have to worry about anyone. I mean, what can they do to us? Kill us?”

“They’re hunters, Dean,” Bobby reminds him. So yeah, there’s that. “And they are coming here.”

“What? Why?”

“Because they know I used to be associated with you and now they think you’re out for me. The whole disappearing from existence number you pulled there did not convince them that you’re just normal living people.”

“If we were, we’d be no longer,” Sam points out. “Or did that guy forget to mention that they beheaded us?”

Bobby briefly closes his eyes, indicating that they did indeed forget to mention it. “Either way, you two need to get away for the time being. Before they find a way to send you to your preset destinations.”

Dean doesn’t quite expect those morons to come anywhere near banishing them, and yet at the mention of them having to go where they have to go he reaches for Sam’s hand, instinctively, and Sam holds it right back. They don’t even realise they are doing it until Bobby gives them a look.

“Well,” Dean says, reluctantly letting go of his brother’s hand (but never of his brother). “They’d be in for a surprise if they tried. It’s not like they even know what we are, and even if they did – we’re not exactly your average, run of the mill, won’t-accept-that-they’re-dead kind of ghosts.”

“Ain’t ya?” Bobby asks sceptically. “Then why do you keep trying to call me?”

He obviously interprets Dean’s blank stare the right way, because he sighs and and says, “Ghosts and electronics don’t go along well, remember? That also goes for you, no matter how alive you might look. I always knew you were trying to call when there was nothing but white noise on the line. Or why did you think I haven’t watched TV since you came here?”

Dean throws a look at his brother, but Sam just shrugs vaguely and doesn’t look half as lost as Dean is feeling. Though, now Bobby mentioned it, it’s kind of hard to believe Dean didn’t notice it himself.

He guesses he was a bit in denial after all. “Point,” he concedes. “But we’re still us and we’re still kicking.”

“Yeah, but sometimes you’re kickin’ straight through the damn wall.” Bobby doesn’t give Dean a chance to reply. “Listen, boy,” he says, his voice growing softer. “Just make a trip for a day or two. Even imbeciles like that Taylor guy get lucky sometimes. Do you really want to risk that?”

“We’re leaving,” Sam decides before Dean can. “Thanks, Bobby.” He takes hold of Dean’s arm and pulls him along, and of course he’s right. If staying with Sam (and not going to Hell) is at stake, taking risks is a no-go.

They don’t take anything. Sam goes through the door first, and when he does, he suddenly twists his hips in a funny way as if trying to get away from something and turns to glare over his shoulder. His glare disappears and his face goes pale when he sees Dean standing almost six feet away from him.

“What is it, Sammy?” Dean asks, alarmed, but Sam shakes his head.

“Nothing. I thought… it’s nothing. Let’s hurry.”

The moment they leave the house through the backdoor, they switch to the world of ghosts and out of the reach of anyone (living) trying to harm them. The last thing Dean hears is the sound of a car stopping on the other side of the house.

 

 

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Calling Bobby to figure out when it’s safe to come back is out of the question, so Dean and Sam find a room in a closed-for-the-season hotel, sneak in through the wall in ghost-mode and prepare to hole up there for about a week, which seems gracious enough. They find another ghost in the attic and Sam actually talks the little girl into letting go and moving on, leaving Dean wondering if that makes him a good hunter or just a good fellow ghost. Or person. Or whatever.

The next day, Sam sits on the bed in the real world and the flimsy curtains blow into the room, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the window were actually open. “Sam,” Dean says in an unspoken plea, not liking this acknowledgement of what they are. It was fun when they were temporary ghosts for a job. Now it’s disturbing.

Sam just looks out of the window, not even paying attention to the things he does with the curtains. His hands are folded in his lap and he’s sitting a little hunched. Looks just like he always did. A little thinner, maybe. A little less substantial, but not in a way that has to do with transparency. “We don’t belong here,” he says.

“Sam, come on.”

“You know it.”

“Stop it. This works.”

“No, it doesn’t. You know it doesn’t. You feel yourself drifting just like me. We have no purpose here.”

Dean wants to slap him. Shake him to make him shut up and see reason. They are no vengeful spirits staying for justice, or revenge. They have no message to pass on, no higher mission. They stay so they can be together and that is worth much more. That’s worth everything. Dean thinks of Sam, of being separated and it’s all he needs to hang on. (But Sam is slipping as well, and it’s like holding on to a rock that’s already rolling towards the abyss.)

“Shut up. It’s working. It has to.”

Sam looks at him for the first time. Until now, Dean might just as well not have been in the room and now Sam looks at him with vague shock as if he’d thought he was actually talking to thin air. “It’s not,” he whispers. And, “Dean.”

Dean wants to take him into his arms and hold him, but that’s not going to help. (They only ever hold each other when it’s already too late.) “Just wait it out, Sammy. We’ll get this. There’s no alternative. You can’t let go. You hear me? You’re not going to Hell. And neither am I.” But he’s fucking lying to himself. Sam’s not making it. Right in front of Dean, his brother is failing because Dean is asking too much of him. Even as he tries a shaky smile and nods. Even as he whispers, “I won’t let you go to Hell, Dean. Not this time. I promise, not this time. Not again.”

“You’re bleeding, Sammy,” Dean says and it feels like giving up. Sam looks at him blankly, his trembling hand slowly reaching up to the trail of blood running from his hairline. He smears the blood all over his skin as he unconsciously trails his fingers over his throat and Dean sees him swallow, and he sees the strangulation marks there: angry bruises and rope burns that weren’t there a minute ago. He reaches for his brother the moment Sam folds forward and coughs a mouthful of blood onto the carpet.

 _Not again, not again_ , Dean keeps thinking over and over, pulling Sam close (too late) and feeling him shudder and gasp for air. “It’s not real, Sammy,” he mutters. “You hear me? Nothing is happening to you! There’s just you and me and you’re safe.”

Sam doesn’t say anything back. But his hands clench around the fabric of Dean’s shirt and he’s still here, he’s still here with Dean. Then, suddenly, he he’s thrown back in Dean’s arms and Dean can barely hold on and Sam’s head falls back and he screams until his scream is cut short by a gurgling sound as his chest breaks open and blood spills all over him and Dean and the bed. He goes limp and Dean pulls him close again, holds him against his own chest and clings and he feels Sam slipping away. He feels something pulling Sam away from him.

This isn’t happening. Dean won’t let it happen, not again, not ever. _I won’t let you got to Hell because of me_ , he swears silently even as the wounds close and Sam clings right back, sobbing helplessly into Dean’s chest like the little boy he never entirely stopped being in his big brother’s heart.

 

 

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They spend the night huddled together in a way they never did in their adult life and only twice before in their afterlife. Dean doesn’t sleep because he never does and doesn’t need to, but to Sam he looks exhausted. Wary. This is wearing him down, and if Sam fails (as he does) he’ll go to Hell and this time there’ll be no benevolent (or pragmatic) angel to pull him out.

Sam won’t let that happen. He won’t allow his brother to suffer the petty revenge of a power-crazed thing that once used to be their friend. It’s bad enough that Cas betrayed them; even worse since he was the only one Dean dared to let into his heart since returning from Hell in shreds.

Sam won’t let him go back there. He failed to save him from that before, he won’t again.

But he’s tired and fading and he knows, he _knows_ he won’t make it much longer. Because as much as he’s bound for Heaven, it’s Hell that wants him back.

Much as it pains him to admit it, pure will alone won’t pull him through this. Not when there are meat hooks hanging from the ceiling that Dean can’t see but that leave bloody holes wherever they pierce Sam’s skin. He needs a plan for this one and the more he thinks about it, the more Sam has to accept the fact that there won’t be a happy ending for both of them.

Perhaps an ending, any ending, is all they can hope to achieve. They need to stop struggling. Sam is too tired, and so, though he would never admit it even to himself, is Dean.

While Dean goes out for hours, Sam spends one day in bed, not sleeping but trying to hide from the afterimages of the cage underneath the pillow. It does nothing to keep Lucifer’s arms from sneaking around him from behind, his erection from pressing against and into Sam. He keeps very still, the way he has learned to. Dean isn’t there and Sam has something left to be glad about. When he hears Dean’s voice, he doesn’t know if it’s really his brother or just Michael mocking him.

He hears Adam scream, at some point. Adam never screamed while Sam was there. Adam was kept away, safe and sound and unaware under Michael’s protection, as long as Sam was there to play with. He was just leverage. Now Sam’s gone, he’s not even that. They’ll let him sleep and forget about him. Michael won’t let Lucifer hurt him because Adam has never given them a reason to hate him. Sam hopes. Sam hopes.

Michael’s memory rapes Sam wearing his brother’s face. Sam makes it to the bathroom to vomit blood and semen just in time and Dean doesn’t see.

The next day, Sam sends Dean away to get pizza, claiming to feel safer when staying behind inside. It’s true, but he also hates himself for using his brother’s desperation for Sam to not get stressed against him. (He feels worse because when he said he wanted pizza, Dean’s face lit up like a fucking Christmas tree.) Once Dean is gone, Sam lets go of the hold he is always semi-aware of having on the world and slides down into the twilight of the dead – immediately realizing it was a mistake when he slides too far, has to struggle and fight like a drowning man struggles to stay on the surface. He manages, this time, but the pull of Hell is stronger than ever and he’s not sure it’ll get better, like it did before.

There are spikes on the walls even here. Spikes he knows too well from being impaled on them while hellhounds ate his entails. Sam forces himself to ignore them and closes his eyes. He listens and hears nothing – no Lucifer, no Michael, not Dean or Dad or Jess. Good. It’s not so bad toady. When Dean is back it’ll get even better. He still has a little time, but that’s not the point.

The point is that right now Sam can assume that everyone he sees is actually really there.

“Cas,” he says. “Castiel…. God. I know you can still hear me when I’m praying.”

“I can hear you whenever I want,” Castiel replies. Sam opens his eyes and knows he’s not hallucinating because he’s never seen Cas wearing clothes like that before. Not even when they were his prisoners, in those few moments when he left the prison of his own memories long enough to see what was happening around him. They are kind of… noble. That’s the only word Sam can think of. Classic. A far cry from suit and trench coat that made him look like a tax accountant unable to iron his clothes. Now he looks like an angel.

Too bad he moved on from that, too.

“I have watched you,” Castiel kindly lets him know. “It was… funny.”

Sam presses his lips together, refusing to let himself be provoked. This isn’t their friend anymore. Castiel betrayed them and his other friends, but he did so with good intentions, even if he lost sight of his ends over his means. Nothing can excuse him for putting that look on Dean’s face, but Cas was redeemable. It is easier to deal with this creature before him if Sam tells himself that Cas died the moment he consumed purgatory and this is the thing that ate him.

He doesn’t want to hate him. Hate is such a waste of energy and this Cas isn’t even a real person. “You want Dean to go to Hell.”

“Well observed.”

“Why? Why him and not me?”

“You served your time.”

“So did Dean.”

“True. But your depths are paid for. You haven’t done anything, since returning, that would condemn you. You fought me, true…” Castiel trails off, suddenly laughs like he just thought of something funny. “You stabbed me in the back. But I do admit that I was threatening your brother. And I punished you for it. Dean, though, Dean gave me an excuse. He killed you, killed himself. Worse, he escaped the just punishment waiting for both of you in my realm. I can hardly reward him for that with paradise.”

“So in other words, you’d only let me go to Heaven because you can’t prevent that.”

Castiel shrugs, seemingly unconcerned. “I can bend the rules but not break them. Not yet. Heaven still has to… get used to me.”

Sam doesn’t even want to imagine what that entails. “I want to make a deal.”

This gets him a vaguely interested glance. “I am not a crossroads demon.”

“No, but you want to bend rules. Deals bend rules. I am offering you a way to legitimately let me go to Hell.”

“And in return?”

“Dean gets my place in Heaven.”

Castiel laughs and Sam knows he’s lost. Still, he keeps talking, desperately. “It would be at once,” he says. “No more lingering here, no more postponing the inevitable. You grab Dean from wherever he is right now and take him to Heaven, and I’m going down. Now.”

Castiel grins and starts pacing up and down the room, tapping his finger against his lips in fake thoughtfulness. The behaviour reminds Sam of Lucifer more than of his lost friend and for one moment he is almost convinced that he’s only talking to himself. “An interesting proposal,” Castiel says. “But why would I want you in Hell rather than Dean?”

“You like Dean better,” Sam reminds him. “Or at least you did when you were still yourself.”

“You know what’s really tempting about this?” the self-proclaimed God asks as if Sam hadn’t spoken. “The fact that, of course, Dean would be anything but happy in Heaven, alone, knowing that you are suffering in his place. I’d go so far as to say that it would be worse.”

“So we have a deal?” Sam dares to hope again. Cas is right – he knows that all too well, but Dean hurting in Heaven is still better than Dean burning in Hell. He’ll rage and grieve and feel crushed by guilt as if he had any say in this matter, but he’ll be safe. He’ll put his energy into trying to get out of Heaven, to get Sam out of Hell, waste it on useless anger and exhaust himself, and over time, even if it takes centuries (they have forever, after all), he’ll forget the reason for his anger. He’ll forget he ever had a brother. It’s Heaven, after all.

Dean is supposed to be happy there.

“You know what’s funny?” Castiel asks instead of answering the question. “Just yesterday I had this same conversation with Dean. He begged me to disregard your choice and just take you to Heaven, promising he’d go to his own destination right away. And by the way, the answer is still No. The only way either of you is going to Heaven is if you, Sam Winchester, agree to do so and leave your brother behind.”

So Dean tried to sacrifice himself for Sam. He really has no right to be angry about that, or to be surprised. “But why?” Sam doesn’t understand the reasoning. “Why does it matter to you which one of us goes where?”

“Because you need to be punished,” Cas tells him matter-of-factly. “If you go, you will do so of your own free will, and you will always know that you left your brother to rot, that you sacrificed him for your happiness, and it will destroy you. If you do not go, you will both go to Hell – something I could not achieve without your senseless sacrifices, so thank you.” He turns away and Sam expects him to just disappear, but before he does, he turns around one more time and says over his shoulder, “You have very little time left, Sam. If you want any chance to go to Heaven, to your parents, to Jessica, before that door is closed forever, you need to go now.”

Then he’s gone. And Sam sits on the edge of the bed, waiting for his brother to show up because Dean will have sensed him shifting planes and he’ll want to know why.

They’ll have a fight and there are many things Sam won’t tell him.

 

 

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Much to Dean’s surprise, Sam doesn’t even try to lie about his reasons for switching back to the twilight world without him. It was obvious that he was up to something, though, so lying wouldn’t have had much of a point anyway. They never before flickered from one plane to the other alone and Dean felt it the moment Sam disappeared; the loss resonating through him like the loss of a limb even though he could sense (in a way that is at the same time new and alien and just falling into place) that Sam was still around somehow. He wasn’t in Hell and he hadn’t gone to Heaven, no matter how much Dean would want him to.

That Sam wants Dean to go to Heaven just as badly still comes as a bit of surprise even though it really, really shouldn’t. Dean has no reason to doubt that Sam loves him and feels responsible for him just as much as the other way round, but something inside him will never see Sammy as anything else but the little brother who is Dean’s everything without any obligation to love him back. Perhaps it’s about time to accept that when John Winchester gave Dean the order to make Sammy the centre of his world, he also made Dean the centre of Sam’s – especially since this notion seems to feature so heavily in Sam’s decision-making-process.

So Sam is pissed because Dean tried to send him to Heaven, which he knows because Cas rattled him out. Cas was able to do that because Sam tried to switch positions with Dean, which pisses off Dean, even though it failed because according to Sam Cas has closed the doors completely and will not accept either of them in Heaven anymore. That’s not what he told Dean, though, so one of them is lying to him and there’s a fight and yelling, which ends with Sam doubling over and vomiting his lungs out. Literally. Dean can only stare at the mess in horror, and then they switche back to the real world and the mess is gone but Sam’s still choking and convulsing for a minute before the fit passes.

“I can’t save you from Hell except by not going there,” he whispers later, when it’s dark outside and Sam is half-lying on Dean, held securely against his chest. Dean can hear the brave smile in his voice. “It’s not so bad. I don’t want to go to Hell either, you know, so it’s a no-brainer, really.”

He’s still talking about saving _Dean_ as if that was the only thing that mattered. And Dean runs his hand through Sam’s hair and it comes back wet and he doesn’t even need light to know that his brother is bleeding again, is being tortured again this very moment, lying trembling and twitching in his arms. He holds him closer and kisses the top of his head and whispers, “How is this not Hell for you?”

 

 

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When they return to Bobby’s three days later, they find the house blocked from them with the lines of salt that haven’t been there since they came here all those weeks ago. Those lines _should_ be there, though, with this being the house of a hunter, and their absence would only have been suspicious to other hunters. Bobby probably put them back after the brothers left last week to keep up appearances with the other guys and then he forgot to break them again. Or maybe those guys are still around. There are plenty of explanations more believable than Bobby not wanting them close anymore, and yet it’s hard not to feel rejected as they are standing before the closed door that denies them access into the house they called their second home for most of their lives.

It doesn’t help that Lucifer keeps whispering in Sam’s ear that Bobby finally realized that they are more trouble than they are worth. Nor does it help that Michael keeps telling him that the other hunters killed Bobby for his association with them and took over his house.

They throw stones at the door because they can’t call, and Sam has gotten so good at not flinching when Satan touches him.

When a car they don’t know pulls up before the house, they go down into the twilight world. Only this time, when Sam sinks too low, he can’t fight his way back to the surface (not with the devil pulling in the opposite direction) and not even Dean reaching out for him can save him from falling until he’s all the way down.

 

 

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Dean thought he knew what it would feel like to lose Sam. He had no idea. One moment his brother is there, the next he’s slipping out of his grasp and is lost. Dean doesn’t know where he is. He has no chance of finding him again, doesn’t know where to start looking when he’s in entirely the wrong place. (He knows Sam is suffering.) The realization is instant and unbearably painful. In the ghostly place that is the shadow of Bobby’s salvage yard, Dean claws at the ground as if he could _dig_ his brother out of Hell and screams.

 

 

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By the time he goes back up and finds Bobby in the open door, Dean is a mess. The older hunter doesn’t even ask. Dean is beside himself with panic, grief and horror, and Sam is nowhere to be seen. It’s not hard to arrive at the right conclusion.

“Calm down,” Bobby tells him only after half an hour of devastation and smashing things. He’s been patient, but he’s also right. Anger won’t help Sam. “There’s gotta be a way to save that brother of yours. You said he’s not even meant to be in Hell.”

“And yet he’s there.” Den fists his hair in desperation. “And there’s no way. Not way at all. Don’t you think I tried? I wanted to deal, but I got nothing to offer. He could just have gone to Heaven. It would have been so easy. Why didn’t he fucking _go_?”

The words are accompanied by a gust of icy wind and the sound of breaking glass brings Dean back to his senses. The window of Bobby’s kitchen is broken and Bobby stares at it and then at Dean, shocked and sombre and terribly knowing.

Dean’s breathing hard; he’s equally shocked, but the anger is hard to fight down. The need to hurt and destroy blindly in retribution to his pain. This is how ghosts become vengeful, he thinks: by taking away their reasons not to be. By making it all they have left to do.

“I’m getting him back,” he promises to the world.

“I know you will.” Bobby’s voice is deliberately calm; Dean pretends he doesn’t see him inching towards the table salt on the shelf. “Calm down and we’ll figure something out.”

“Calm down?” It takes all of Dean’s self-control not to explode again. “It’s been hours! Time moves faster in Hell – Sam’s been there for days! He’s been screaming for da-” Dean closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I don’t have time to calm down and think about it.”

“Then what-” Bobby doesn’t get to finish – or maybe he does and Dean just doesn’t hear it because he’s not in the room anymore. Not in the way Bobby is. Everything is silent and faded and empty (because Sam’s not there) as Dean walks out into the yard straight through the wall, yelling for Tessa.

She appears after a minute, stepping out from behind the wreck of a car. “It’s happened, then,” she notes, and Dean snarls at her.

“Don’t say, ‘I told you so’!”

“I did, but I wasn’t going to.” She actually looks sad. “What now, Dean? You know you can’t stay long without your brother anchoring you.”

“You think I want to? I want you to take me to Hell. Right now!”

“You hardly need me for that at this point.” But she steps closer anyway and takes Dean’s arm. “Do you know we don’t usually do this? There are exceptions, but normally, people get one chance to come with us, and one only.”

“People don’t usually know where they are going either,” Dean recalls. “If you hadn’t told us… if you’d let us believe that we’d both go to Heaven, we would have gone willingly and Sam would be safe now.”

“While you were burning.”

“As I’m going to be in a minute anyway. Except you’re right, of course.”

“Right in what?”

“I don’t need you to go to Hell. But I’m pretty sure you know a backdoor. Some way of entry that won’t land me instantly on some rack. I have to find Sam.”

“You won’t. Even if I do manage to get you there unbound.”

“I know Hell.”

“I know. You won’t find him.” She says it full of regret and icy dread settles in the centre of Dean’s stomach.

“He’s not… He didn’t go back to the cage, did he?” Something is building up inside Dean, something raw and dark and powerful, and the hunter he was knows that Bobby will have no choice but to banish his spirit if the answer is yes.

“No,” Tessa tells him and perhaps saves the world. “At least not yet.”

Dean doesn’t want to think about what that might mean. Right now, it only means that he has no time to waste. “Then why wouldn’t I find him?”

“You know Hell. It’s larger than the world and there are layers. Circles. I don’t know where Sam is, but I suspect he’s deep down. Deeper than you used to be. Time moves faster the deeper you go. It might already be too late.”

“It isn’t.” Sam’s not going to become a demon. Even if he’s been there for decades, nothing and no one can torture the humanity out of him. He spent centuries with Satan and Satan’s big brother and came back broken and bleeding and still full of compassion and love.

“Even if it’s not, your chances of finding him are barely existent. There are only very few places for me to get you down, so even if I knew where he was I couldn’t get you near him. You might be looking for millennia, and by then, neither of you will remember your own names.”

“It’s enough if I remember his,” Dean says firmly. “I’ll find him because that’s what I do. That’s who I am. _You_ just need to get me down there.”

So she does.


	3. Chapter 3

Hell is not Hell. There is no generalized description for it by anyone who’s ever been there, and the place Dean finds himself in after what feels like a long fall is not the Hell he knows. The light is dimmer, darker, everything the colour of blood and shit. Black sticks are sticking out of the sodden ground, like charred bones. It stinks of sulphur, ammoniac and decay.

It’s not worse than the area Dean once called home. It’s not better, either. Comparisons like that are the first step to madness. There are as many different landscapes in Hell as there are on Earth, but all of them are Hell. Meant for eternal punishment. All of them are horrible.

Yet Dean would be a fool not to accept that it gets worse than what he sees or what he lived through. It’s just that thoughts like “It could be worse” are entirely inappropriate. And thinking that others have it better is a foolproof way for the soul to commit suicide.

He looks around and doesn’t see Tessa anywhere. Either she couldn’t enter herself or she just dropped him here and fucked off. It doesn’t really matter and Dean doesn’t really care. He looks around and sees no movement, no other person, be it demon or hellhound or tortured soul.

Certainly no Sam. But that would have been asking for too much anyway.

Dean doesn’t even know on what circle he is, though he would suspect the third or fifth. It’s probably no deeper than that, and he can rule out the fourth. That’s were he used to be, what he knows. He never saw all of it, but this isn’t it. The smell isn’t right.

And there is no criss-crossing of chains and wriggling bodies in the sky above him.

The ground is soft, wet; thick liquid that looks like puss from an infected wound squirts out as he walks. The black sticks protrude from it in regular intervals, like markings on a field. When Dean looks closer at one of them, he can see remnants of burned flesh clinging to it. So it _is_ charred bone. He’s not surprised in the least.

Something inside him that is familiar with Hell stirs at the sight and informs him it’s an arm. Dean grabs the thing, pulls on it, and the soil lets it go with a sickening wet sound. Sure enough there’s more flesh sticking to it, in the process of rotting off the bone. The thing ends in a hand with exposed sinews and muscles and three remaining fingers. As Dean watches, the fingers twitch.

It’s not Sam’s hand. He places it back onto the ground and keeps walking.

 

 

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Somewhere in all of this, Sam is being tortured right now. If he’s really being held on a deeper level where time runs even faster, he is being tortured for hours or days or even weeks with every step Dean takes.

The despair leads to anger, anger to pain. The anger needs an outlet – Dean needs to hurt someone and since the ones deserving of his hatred aren’t here, anyone will do. He hears the screaming of the damned in the distance and gravitates towards them in a mindless desire to lessen his own agony by inflicting agony on someone else.

It’s how he existed for ten years, and it’s so easy to fall back into that. But the torture of strangers won’t help Sam. And Dean might lose himself, might not be the one he was when he finally finds Sam, or he might forget why he was looking in the first place, what the cause of the pain was for which he’s seeking relief. In any case, giving in to the desire will be the first and only necessary step to becoming a demon and Dean won’t do that. Can’t do that. Sam needs him. During his first stay in Hell he gave in because there had been nothing to hold on for and no hope. Now there’s Sam.

Dean focuses on his determination and ignores the screaming as he walks on.

 

 

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As the screams get louder, the ground changes. It dries out, then becomes burning hot. After a day, the soles of Dean’s shoes melt. After another day, his shoes are destroyed and he walks on bare feet that get burned with every step. He never stops. He doesn’t join the chorus of the tortured.

A woman screams nearby; the long, hopeless scream of a soul giving up. Dean shudders, and is glad for the sadness he feels. He’s still himself.

 

 

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After a week, a demon finds him. It happens by accident. Dean sees the mangled, ugly form of a creature unable to remember their own face the moment the demons sees him: an unbroken soul, wandering free. It’s a weak demon, almost mindless. It doesn’t recognize Dean like most other demons would have. He can’t kill it, so he impales it on the branch of a spiked tree and leaves it behind. It can’t help him.

The next demon Dean happens upon can. It’s a woman, or used to be. She’s ugly as the night, but has enough of a face left to leer at him when he presses her against the smouldering ground. She brings up her hips, grinds them against him and hisses, “Winchester. It’s nice to see you again down here. I always knew it would be only a matter of time before you would have a family reunion in our living room.”

She knows Sam is here. Word gets around quickly, even here, and Hell waited far too long to get both of them in its clutches. Dean presses her down until she screams, sits on her to give his own feet a rest and finally she understands that the only way to make him go away is to give him a direction.

Sam is downstairs. Dean knew that, but he didn’t know where to cross to the next circle before she tells him. When he leaves, he’s running despite the burned skin sticking to the ground with every step, the pain that he can ignore because he knows it has no consequence and because finding Sam is more important. He comes to a canyon eventually, and just before he leaps down into the endless blackness it contains, he hears a hellhound howl in the distance and knows they got his trail.

 

 

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The fall feels like being torn apart, and then he is upon impact and loses time being set back together from a pile of bloody flesh and broken bones that only knows agony and a name to a human being. He lost every pursuer when he jumped but knows it’s only a matter of time before someone finds him.

He has to be quicker than that. As it happens, he finds someone first, a demon who’s distracted by impaling what’s left of some guy who may or may not deserve it on a stake. Dean uses the element of surprise, does some impaling himself, and learns that he is in the sixth circle and that Sammy isn’t here, because if he was, the demon he caught would be “standing in line, waiting for my turn”. Dean cuts off his head and throws it in the lake of acid in which some parts of the demon’s victim are slowly dissolving, hoping that will shut him up for a while.

He keeps the knife, knowing he’s going to need it, and runs, his lungs burning. He runs until he comes to a city, the buildings grey and all the windows empty. It looks abandoned but Dean knows better than to believe it to be. He has heard of these places and would rather avoid it, if he could.

But there are only two directions to take, and somewhere behind him, he hears the faint echo of a hound’s howl. His heart jumps and speeds up, the fear of the things that tore him apart deeply etched into his soul.

He keeps to the periphery of the city, does his best not to let his fear make him careless and loses it anyway when the hellhound howls again and sounds so much closer.

The city stretches on for hours and days (months for Sam), wedged between an endlessly high wall of stone and an endlessly deep cliff. Dean considers jumping down in hopes of winding up in the seventh circle but is stopped by his fear that he will come down the wall opposite the cliff and lie shattered in this very same city, helpless and for anyone to find.

(The first few yards his burned and bleeding feet left bloody traces on the stone but his wounds heal quickly, and when he turns around, the footprints are already gone.)

It’s silent. There is not a single sound to be heard. All that happens here happens invisibly behind closed doors that leave everything to the imagination. Most of the houses are empty. Not all of them. Dean can’t see anything in the windows but he feels like the windows are seeing him as he creeps through backstreets made of cobblestone. It’s clean and orderly here, sterile. He is an intruder the city does not want and will not tolerate.

He doesn’t rest or stop even once in all the time it takes him to make it to the other side.

 

 

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Two days later, a demon looking so human that he can only recently have returned from a trip to the outside pins Dean to a dead tree with a two-headed spear. “Don’t cry, little hunter,” he mocks after spitting in Dean’s face. “You wouldn’t have found little Sammy anyway, and even if you had, he wouldn’t have been what you were looking for. He’s all the way down, don’t you know? As close to the cage as you can get without actually being in it. And if they promised to give him a break if he hurt you, he would tear you to pieces. So really, I’m just sparing you the disappointment. Show me how grateful you are!”

He touches Dean and Dean cuts off his arm with the knife he kept hidden in the waistband of his pants. While the demon screeches, he pulls the spear out of his own chest and uses it to pin the demon to the ground with the spearheads running through his eyes. Afterwards, he stumbles on until his legs give out and he has to wait until his wounds have healed so he’s no longer chocking on his own blood.

He finds the way down later that day: a tunnel in the wall leading down and down and down. At parts there are stairs. At other parts the ground is so steep Dean looses his footing and slides down helplessly. This way is not meant to be travelled in the other direction, but Dean will worry about getting back up when the time comes.

He lands with a feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that makes him nervous, makes him want to claw into his own skin and he can’t name it. He’s closer to Sam now, he _will_ find him, and he doesn’t know where this sense of hopelessness comes from, like the echo of a memory not his own.

The air in this place makes it nearly impossible to breathe. As someone long dead, Dean doesn’t have to breathe, but his soul doesn’t know that and his instincts don’t care that they are using only the memory of lungs. The acid stink makes him cough, makes his throat close and his heart race as he’s suffocating, and he knows he will never get used to it.

Overcoming the stink and breathing leads to constant coughing and blood running from his mouth as the air eats away his throat. Dean keeps walking on. (Sam’s in a place worse than this and has been for a long time.)

 

 

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He gets lost in the eighth circle for a month, wandering without stopping on feet that are bleeding even when the ground isn’t tearing them apart. The blood leaves an easy trail for the hellhounds to follow. Dean hopes they are still looking for him a level above. He hasn’t heard them in a long time.

Exhaustion wears him down, but he keeps walking, his brother the only motivation he needs. The need for rest exists in this place, but rest doesn’t, so there is no point in stopping anyway, no matter how much it hurts.

He never meets anyone in all the time. One could think the eighth circle is entirely empty, but Dean knows it’s just big.

Sometimes he imagines other souls, ones without a goal or a meaning, to be left on the endless plain he arrived on, all alone. Maybe crucified or impaled and then left with their agony and the knowledge that every star in the universe will die without anyone ever coming for them. Maybe just wandering. Wandering until the emptiness drives them mad; until even the torture they know it will bring doesn’t stop them from longing for company. And then, eventually, after years and years and years, they find the end of the wasteland and run into a demon and are s _o, so glad_ , and then the demon will torture them and they will regret ever having come here, will wish they stayed on their own with the acid air and the silence forever. And then, in the end, the demon will impale them on a stake and leave them in the wasteland they came from.

But maybe something like that never happens. Dean doesn’t need years to leave the wasteland. He doesn’t like what his imagination does in this place.

He imagines what happens to strangers to avoid imagining what is happening to Sam.

 

 

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There is no point of orientation for Dean, not one. No demon to ask how to get deeper down. But he never stops to think about where to go. He just keeps walking as if drawn by an unseen force, as if he _knew_ how to get there. Get to Sam.

Get to Sam.

His name is Dean. He’s the son of John and Mary Winchester. He’s facing eternity without his brother if he gives up, gives in, forgets. (Sam never allowed for the easy way out. Being all alone on the plain was nothing compared to being without Sam.)

 

 

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The ground changes again, after a while. Becomes black metal and concrete, and Dean realises when he sees the gaps and straight edges that he’s walking on top of incredibly high, incredibly large buildings. This isn’t like the City. This is somehow worse.

Over stairs and ladders and alleys he makes his way down, letting his instincts guide him. His instincts know the direction, but this is a maze and he gets lost again and again. A sense of time that measures the days in pain with the old, internal clock of Hell, tells him of the passing of many days before finally he finds a circular hole, way down where it’s so dark he can barely see anything, can barely see the first steps leading down, and he knows this is it. The way to the ninth circle, that no soul or demon in their right mind would ever walk in this direction.

There’s a breeze of cooler, fresher air coming up, like an invitation. Dean climbs down, and soon the darkness swallows him whole.

 

 

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He wanders through the dark for days, always downwards on winded stairs. He’s not careful because he knows he’s all alone on this stairway to the (second) deepest pit there is. Eventually, there’s light again; not bright but there, and the moment the wall to his left disappears, Dean falls to his knees and down the stairs that keep going on and on, overcome by a despair he can’t fight or justify.

When he comes to a stop, he lies panting, looking up to the underside of something massive and forever, and inside him something feels like screaming. Something he can’t grasp or identify, except he _knows_ it – of course he knows. He’s known all the time, ever since he started to let his instincts guide him. It’s the alien feeling inside him that’s been getting stronger the further down he got and now it’s all there and it’s not alien. It’s just not his.

It’s fear and despair and agony. It’s hopelessness and resignation. It’s humiliation and longing and disgust.

It’s Sam being tortured. Sam, somehow reaching his brother, or maybe it’s Dean somehow reaching him. It doesn’t matter. Sam’s there, somewhere, still far away, and Dean, halfway back to his feet, almost gets knocked downs again when the pain strikes. It doesn’t even hurt him; it hurts Sam, and that is so much worse.

It’s distracting and dangerous, but Dean reaches out to the sense of his brother, needing to hold on to him after such a long time of separation. He doesn’t dare to try and block him off for fear of losing him again. He won’t let him suffer alone.

It’s not even like he can tell what is being done to his brother right now. He can’t read Sam’s thoughts or tell where he is. He just gets an impression of _how_ he is, and he’s not good.

He can tell Sam’s not fighting. Whatever is happening to him, Dean’s brother is accepting it because this is Hell and he has nothing to hope for.

 _Hold on, Sammy,_ Dean thinks. _Hold on, I’m coming._

 

 

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Dean figures the sense of Sam is so much stronger here because of the time shift. When he was on the upper circles, time moved so much slower for him than it did for his brother and everything was compressed and mashed together, since Sam went through so many different forms of suffering in one of Dean’s moments.

Now it’s all happening in real time, and while Dean can’t tell exactly what is happening, he has ideas. After all, the tortures of Hell aren’t a stranger to him. He gets a sense of shame, humiliation and helplessness from Sam, a sense of being used and degraded and knows his brother is getting raped. It goes on for a long time while Dean climbs down the stairs, for hours and hours. Weeks, even. The stairs don’t end. He can’t make out the underside of the eighth circle anymore – it’s long since gotten lost to the grey twilight and there might just as well be a sky above him. The ground comes closer slowly, but a long time and many stairs go by before he can even make it out in the distance. He is just able to recognize distinctive structures far, far below when they start forcing themselves on his brother, and that sensation stays with him for far too long. Nothing changes but for Sam’s desperation growing, for as long as Dean needs to be level with the highest towers that are rising up from the sea of bare, windowless buildings.

It takes days. There have to be dozens of them. And through that sense of desolate hopelessness, Dean reaches back for his brother. Tries to let him know that he’s coming, that he’ll be there soon and then it’ll stop hurting and his big brother will kill them all, every last one of them. But the feeling of abuse is replaced only by all-consuming, mindless agony as they change their torture without a moment of respite and there’s no recognition, no sense of _Dean_ in all that. Sam is suffering and he doesn’t know Dean is going to save him.

The uneven stairs wind around a thick pillar that reaches up into the sky as if supporting it. Every now and then Dean thinks he sees something moving through the twilight, just at the edge of his vision, sliding through the air like a knife through flesh. He knows there are worse things than hellhounds on the lower levels.

But they never come closer, either not seeing him or not caring. Or they are playing a game. Dean can’t care as long as Sam’s suffering all alone. He will care as soon as it’s his job to keep his brother safe on the way back up.

There are bridges connecting the pillar with paths between the buildings. Dean ignores them for a long time. They are all going in the wrong direction. Only when he finds one that points towards the area he’s drawn to does he leave the stairs and disappears in the maze built from faceless buildings. Buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, and not all of them have doors. After a while of wandering up and down stairs, through tunnels and up rusty ladders, Dean sees a tower in the distance that is higher than any he has seen before, and he knows this is it. Sam’s in there, all the way up, like a fucking princess in a fairy tale. Only, the princess was just sleeping. At this point, Sam might have forgotten what sleep is.

 

 

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Dean hurries, but he can only run so fast. He gets lost, has to backtrack his own bloody footsteps and look for another way when he looses sight of the tower. He has to hide, once, from something he can hear breathing in the shadows but he can never see. At some point his body refuses to let him move on and he has to rest until his body understands that rest is not going to do anything before he can walk again.

All the time he listens to Sam inside him and his heart is breaking without pause. Dean isn’t easily shaken, but his brother’s torment scares him like nothing else he ever felt.

In all the time, Dean only ever sees one demon. It walks between the buildings and Dean hides until it’s gone. He has never seen a demon like it before. It’s huge and foreign, a mass of claws and thorns and scars, and it leaves a trail of blood and shredded skin in its wake. He can’t tell the gender, or if it even has one. The shape is only vaguely humanoid, the knees bend in the wrong direction, the hands don’t have the right number of fingers. This is what happens when even the last memory of humanity is driven out of a soul.

He avoids a confrontation, not willing to test the strength of a creature that has existed on cruelty for millennia and has nothing left to be taken away. The thing has nothing to offer him. Dean knows where Sam is, but for the first time he begins to worry about what might be with him.

 

 

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He knows Sam is at the top of the building, but when Dean finally finds the entrance to the tower after days of circling it, the stairs only lead down. He goes down, then, and still feels that he is getting closer.

It gets hotter the further down he gets. The whole time on this circle, Dean has been puzzled by the almost pleasant temperature that is so unlike Hell. Now it quickly becomes so hot his skin sizzles. After a day or so, his hair catches fire. For a while he has to walk blindly.

But Sam is close. So close that now, Dean can hear his screams not only in his mind. So he goes on, not sure if he’s lucky not to have run into anyone yet or if someone is playing with him.

He hears Sam scream for ages as he feels for the next step and feels the wall with fingers that have been reduced to charred bone. His lungs should have stopped existing long ago, but somehow they are still there to create the illusion of agonized breaths. Fortunately, Dean has no air to scream.

Then, as quickly as the heat came, it disappears. When Dean can see again, he finds himself standing panting at the foot of the stairs, facing a long, narrow hall that is lined with stone tables. There’s a smell in the air that is partially burned flesh (his own?) and partially something else. The end of the hall is lost to darkness.

Sam stopped screaming long ago. There’s only silence waiting for Dean at the end of his journey.

Lined neatly on the tables are instruments of torture. There is no recognizable order to them. From tiny to large – as long as it is small enough to fit on a table, it’s here. There are the classic ones –thumb screws, branding irons, whips, flaying knifes and a hundred more that man has thought of for whatever reason – and there are those that only exist in Hell because they can only be used on a thing that can’t die. Dean knows many of them intimately, from using them as well as having them used to him. There are others that he has never seen before; he doesn’t dare speculate what they are for.

Dean walks past them. The tables are packed, and there’s one after another after another. He wonders if all of these things have been used on Sam and feels sick. There are things he knows are specifically meant for the torture of women, but demons are nothing if not inventive.

Sam is still silent. He’s still there, though. Dean can still feel him, and Sam still doesn’t know anything about his coming. His loneliness is crushing. The longing for Dean.

“I’m here, Sammy,” Dean whispers and speeds up his steps. There’s no point inspecting everything that’s lined up here. This hall must end eventually, and all that matters is what’s awaiting him past it all.

Sam’s agony is dull now, steady. Without ups and downs. They are taking a break, it seems, and maybe impaled Sammy on a stake for it, or cut off his limps and left him lying on a grill roast to suffer on his own while they are doing something else. Dean doesn’t know if he welcomes that because it means no one will be present that he has to go through to get to Sam, or if he’s disappointed because he wants his chance to tear them apart.

Then, finally, there is a door. It’s dark like the walls, so in the dim light Dean only sees it when he’s already close. For one second he stops to take a deep breath and steel himself for what he might find behind it. And in that second, something behind him lets out a deep growl.

Dean freezes. All his instincts scream to run, but before he can comply, it jumps and it’s pure instinct that makes him throw himself down so it flies over him instead. When he gets up, the deep red glow of its eyes are before him and he can see the teeth, so much like the teeth that once tore him apart. (Maybe they did.)

It’s huge, the largest hellhound Dean has ever seen. Thick muscles play underneath the hard, leathery skin and thorns are protruding from its back, along the spine, curving inwards. Its head and neck are lined with tiny tentacles that each end in a tiny head, like a snake’s. The paws end in claws and the skin hangs off the thing in decaying flaps. Its glowing eyes stare at Dean hungry and terribly knowing. Waiting for him to run.

But there’s only one thing it needs to know: It’s standing between Dean and the door. Between Dean and Sam.

And Dean will not run in the opposite direction.

He grabs his knife tightly with one hand and takes something unpleasant off a table beside him with the other, and when the hound lets out a growl that sounds like there’s another Hell deep inside its guts, Dean growls right back.

 

 

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Behind the door is a throne room. Dean hadn’t expected that. It’s small, as throne rooms go, but still large. There are smears of blood on the floor but they are few and far in between and no accurate reflection of what must have gone on in here not too long ago. The walls are lined with thorn racks that look dry and dead upon first observation, but are actually moving softly as if having a mind of their own. The room is bare but for the small pedestal at the end and the throne standing on it; a massive thing made of steel and sharp edges.

Sam is sitting on it like a king, except there is something wrong with his posture. He’s sitting straight, yet his head is hanging low, like he has no strength to keep it up. One of his knees is twisted at the wrong angle. There is a bone protruding from his arm just above the elbow.

He doesn’t look up when Dean enters. Neither does the demon sitting beside him, his head resting on Sam’s hand and his fingers curled lovingly around Sam’s calf. The only one who notices when the door falls shut behind Dean is the demon that might have once been female who’s lying curled up at Sam’s feet like a cat. She opens her unevenly sized eyes upon the noise and sits up in surprise, making a hissing noise full of disgust and contempt. Dean can’t help but notice the mass of writhing hands in the gaping wound that would have been her stomach once, or the thick, spiked tail twitching in annoyance, and he understands that she’s hissing because human words have long since lost all meaning to her.

He throws the severed head of the hellhound at her feet and that shuts her up.

It also alerts her companion who turns towards Dean as well, only to jump up the next second, standing as a shield between him and Sam. It’s perverted and wrong and makes Dean sick. “Sammy,” he calls, but Sam doesn’t move. He’s not unconscious – oblivion does not exist here – but Dean senses no reaction to his voice, none at all. Sam is lost in his agony, out of reach.

Dean hisses back at the two demons. There are more around here, about to return any moment, but right now there’s just the two of them, and he doesn’t care how powerful and evil they are. Not as long as they are in his way.

The tail of the female (female?) one grazes Sam’s leg, tearing open the skin. Sam doesn’t react, but the other demon does. Dean momentarily forgotten, he suddenly punches her in the face and sends her flying, and when she jumps back to her feet with an angry shriek, he curls his claws around Sam neck and shoulders in a possessive gesture that leaves Sam’s skin in shreds.

That’s when Dean understands: them lying at Sam’s feet in what looked like submission was really a gesture of their adoration and twisted worship. It’s not a coincidence that they placed Sam on a throne in the deepest pit of Hell. He suddenly remembers Casey, the demon he was trapped with in a basement so very long ago, who told him how ready she was to follow Sam should he ever chose to lead them.

Some demons are still waiting for Sam to come and be their boy king. He is the ruler they have been longing for, and now he finally came to them but is still unwilling to take on his role. So they took him where they think is his rightful place and nailed him to the throne.

These things love Sam, in a twisted, perverted way that left him broken and starved and abused, and it makes Dean want to throw up.

Sam still doesn’t know he’s here. He barely knows anything that’s going on around him – Dean can feel his exhaustion, knows that even opening his eyes seems like too much effort when all he will see is the promise of new pain.

Dean is not at his best right now. His wounds have healed but he is dirty and bloody, his clothes in shreds, his feet bare and bleeding.  There’s a hellhound’s blood all over him. He stinks of burned skin and hair and he wants nothing more than for his brother to look at him.

“Sammy,” he whispers again, and maybe there’s something in Sam that he reached. But it’s not enough. Sam doesn’t believe Dean is really here. Dean needs to get to him, and if those demons give him trouble, he will end them.

To his considerable surprise, they step aside, watching passively, if alert, as he climbs the stairs and reaches out with a trembling hand to cup his brother’s face. Sam is thin, even thinner than he was when he died emaciated and sick on the floor of Castiel’s prison. There are metal bolts going through his body; through his hands, his arms, his torso. His stomach and thighs. Through his feet, fixing them to the floor. They are rusty and the flesh around them red and inflamed. This is them taking it easy. This is Sam getting a break.

His head lolls limply in Dean’s hands, blood dripping from his parted lips. Dean runs his thumbs ever so softly over the hollow cheeks, leaning in, whispering the word, “Please” against Sam’s lips as tears stream down his face.

Sam opens his eyes, and they are full of recognition.

“No,” he whispers.

“Sam, it’s really me.”

“No, please.”

“Sammy, I’m here.” Dean wants to pull him against his chest but the bolts prevent it. He kisses the top of his head instead as Sammy whispers “Don’t be,” against his skin.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Dean promises and reaches for the first bolt. It sits tightly and Sam jerks as Dean tries to move it. Someone snickers. But Dean keeps pulling and eventually the thing comes lose, the ripped surface tearing out flesh and skin as he pulls it from Sam’s arm.

One down.

Sam keeps trying to talk; he doesn’t know he doesn’t have to. Dean can tell without words that Sam never wanted him here. He wants Dean, but he doesn’t want Dean to actually be there. “You’re an idiot,” Dean tells him as he pulls free the second nail, starts with the third. “I’m not gonna let you rot any more than you would me. When you said we’d go down together, did you think that didn’t count for you?” Sam’s left arm is free, and he moves it weakly to paw at Dean’s body. Dean can feel his pain. “Shh,” he whispers, pressing a kiss into Sam’s hair. “Just be still. I’ll get you out. Gonna take care of you.”

There are the demons to consider. Dean doesn’t have to look to know that there are more, now. The room is slowly filling with creatures watching him struggle, but he doesn’t care. Only Sam matters. In the face of having to get his little brother to safety, not even hurting them for hurting Sam takes precedence.

It takes hours, maybe a day. Time has no meaning here. Dean measures it in the wounds that break open in his palms from the nails that refuse to budge, from the fingernails he loses and gains back. His own wounds come and go. Sam’s stay open longer, and when they close they do so incompletely, leaking blood and yellow puss.

The nail in Sam’s stomach is the last one. It is hooked, he realizes too late, and when he yanks it free, intestines are pulled out right along and he has to pick them off the hook and stuff them back. Sam would be far past unconscious from pain alone, if he could be. He falls against his brother when Dean is done, boneless and sobbing.

It’s then that there is movement behind him. It’s then that Dean turns and sees the dozens of demons in different states of degeneration and humanity gathered around them. They are blocking the exit and there is no way, no way in _Hell_ that he can get through all of them.

He ever so gently leans Sam’s limp form against the arm of the throne, making sure he won’t fall down, and turns to face the music.

 

 

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It’s a short fight, in the end. Dean never stood a chance, and he only lasts three rounds because the demons are toying with him, attacking one by one instead of all at once. By the time number four, five and six decide to gang up on him, the first one he defeated is already standing again. Dean never stood a chance, and he knew it before he had Tessa deliver him to Hell.

But he couldn’t possibly have not tried. And now, at least, he is with Sam, even if that only means they can watch each other be torn apart for all eternity.

Starting now. While Dean is distracted fighting one demon off, another grabs his broken arm and the third one tears its claws through Dean’s back. He can’t hold off a scream, and the last thing he thinks when he sees the sharp nails of the first demon’s hand go for his eyes is _‘Sammy, don’t watch!’_

But the pain he waited for doesn’t come. The exact moment those fingers should have ripped out his eyes, the word “Stop!”, spoken in Sam’s voice, freezes everything. And Dean almost doesn’t notice, because something changes that moment, _Sam_ changes, and sensing that leaves little room for anything else.

He turns around, eventually, and the demons just let him. Sam is standing before the throne, naked and wounded, and all the demons before him are cowering in awe.

There has been something Sam has been fighting for after all, even when he was all alone in Hell with no hope of ever getting out: he struggled, through torture and degradation, to remain himself, to hold on to his humanity and not become what they wanted him to be. What he was always meant to be. (Maybe what he was all along.)

And one minute of watching his brother get hurt made him give it up.

“Oh Sammy,” Dean whispers. He shakes the demon’s claw off the arm that is just now knitting itself back together and makes his way up the steps towards his brother, slowly, either afraid or afraid of scaring Sam, he doesn’t know. Sam follows every of his steps with his eyes, looking at the same time controlled, demanding, and lost.

Dean cups his face, makes his little brother look at him with eyes full of pain, grief and determination. They are yellow.

The next second they roll back and Sam falls into Dean’s arms. Something inside Dean snaps; the presence that has accompanied him for so long disappears as Sam’s consciousness, for the first time in maybe decades, gets to leave his tortured memory of a body.

Dean hoists him into his arms and starts down the stairs and towards the door. No one tries to stop him.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Nothing and no one tries to stop them, ever, all the way back up through the ninth, eighth and seventh circle. Dean never even sees any other creature and even the screams of the damned seem further away than they used to be. It is as if everything is making an effort to get out of their way, which is kind of funny, considering that Dean is unarmed and Sam is unconscious.

Still, Dean cannot get up fast enough. He never rests even though he’s carrying his brother in his arms or on his back all the time. Maybe it’s a good thing that while Sam’s wounds slowly closed, he remains as emaciated as he was when Dean found him. Dean still doesn’t like the look of him. He would rather carry several pounds more.

(He doesn’t even know _what_ he’s carrying. If this is even his brother anymore.)

Dean goes back the way he came because he doesn’t know any other. He’s not sure what he’ll do when he gets as far up as he can go.

Somewhere on the sixth circle, he stops. The emptiness inside him that Sam’s passing out caused is beginning to fill again, so he carefully places his brother on the ground and waits.

It takes another day or so for Sam to open his eyes, and they are still yellow. Although, now Dean has the time to look closely without them closing on him, he sees that they are more golden than yellow. And other than Azazel’s eyes, they don’t look like marble but just like normal eyes. Except they are golden. And just maybe glowing ever so slightly.

They are beautiful.

Which isn’t to say that Sam’s eyes haven’t been beautiful before. And it was a beauty that Dean was used to all his life. This is something new.

And yet, as he looks into his brother’s strange yet familiar eyes and feels his presence resonate deep within his own soul, he understands that this is still Sam.

He cups his brother’s face and Sam fists his hands in Dean’s hair and they just gravitate towards each other, the way gravity had Dean falling towards Sam ever since he entered Hell. Their lips meet in something that might have been a long time coming and Dean is almost glad, almost relieved, because he has no words to express what he’s feeling, all his fear and doubt, longing and love, in a way that makes sense, but this kiss, the desperation and need and joy in it, that is something they both can understand.

When they break apart, Sam says “Dean” like it’s a prayer. It sends a shiver down Dean’s spine.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sammy.” The mantra of his life. “Can you walk?”

Sam can. On the fifth circle, the way leads past a recently abandoned prison where fresh souls were locked in and allowed to listen to the screams of the tortured in anticipation of their own turn. All the cells are empty, the doors ajar. In one, they find a pile of plain, black clothes. Sam puts them on, obviously relieved to be able to cover his body that has not been any less abused for all that the marks are gone, and when Dean sees how perfectly the clothes fit him, he can’t help but wonder if this was Hell making Sam a gift.

He glances over for the hundredth time, catching another glimpse of those slanted golden eyes that he might never get used to.

It’s testament to how long he has been down here that he hasn’t made a James Bond joke yet.

In the fifth circle they reach the point from which Dean started. It doesn’t offer any way for them to get out of Hell, but he didn’t expect that. They just keep moving, looking for a way further up.

Altogether, the way up here seemed shorter than it was in the other direction, and that’s a bit of a surprise, considering that there were passages Dean has been certain could only be walked in one direction, including one very long free fall. But they always found a way. They rest more than Dean did on the way down, but they do so because it actually has an effect and they are less tired after they took a break. For the first time in months (years?), Dean sleeps.

One of them always keeps watch, but nothing ever comes close to them. “It won’t always be this calm,” Sam tells Dean somewhere on their way from third to second circle. “It’s like everyone’s in shock, but they are coming out of it now. They’ll come after us soon.”

“How can you tell?”

Sam shrugs helplessly. “I just know.” He won’t look at Dean, afraid of his own nature. Ashamed for being different, a freak.

That much hasn’t changed. What exactly did change when Sam accepted his place as a king of Hell in order to save his brother, Dean suspects only time can teach them.

What he does know is that Sam can’t sense Dean the way Dean senses him. Why, they can’t begin to fathom, especially since Sam’s senses have been attuned to Hell so much it seems to react to him rather than him reacting to it. He knows when demons are nearby, he knows just how rotten they are or aren’t. So far the demons didn’t dare to get near them, but that’ll change, Sam says. Well, Dean will be ready.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Dean’s never been on the first circle before. It’s a place of light punishment, considered hellish only by those who have never been any further down. Time moves much slower here, one year in one month.

One level down it’s two years, another down four, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two… always twice as much as above. Sam has been down at the bottom for a very long time before Dean even got Tessa to bring him here. (He never found out how fast time moved in the cage, but Sam once checked out for a few minutes and later said his flashback felt like a week. Dean can do the math.)

And yet here Sam is, still creepily skinny, not exactly healthy looking, but in one piece and no more insane than he has been as a ghost. In fact, he seems better, mentally. Dean feels a calmness in him that he’s pretty sure his brother didn’t have before falling into Hell, and he knows this unsettles Sam as much as it does him. He tells himself that it’s because he’s finally gone to a (if not _his_ ) final destination, no matter how badly it sucks, instead of lingering in the mortal world where the pull of the afterlife drives every ghost crazy in the end. The theory is easier to accept than the thought that maybe Sam’s soul is soothed by this place because he simply belongs here.

That doesn’t mean that Sam is okay now. He’s been having nightmares almost every time he slept so far, though most of the time Dean was able to sooth them away with gentle touches. Only once did Sam jerk awake and Dean saw the last impressions of new scars quickly fading away.

Sam is not well. He might not yet have been saved, even thought Dean doesn’t know where he should fall this time. (The cage is still below them.) But he’s better, even after all the torture he’s been through. He’s letting Dean touch him despite the recent rape, leans into his touches and feels better for them and it’s a win after all the losses. It counts for something. There’s another way for them to go but down.

Though for the moment, metaphors aside, they have reached the end of the climb. There’s no more Hell above them. In fact, there is nothing else above them since Hell is not, in fact, hidden somewhere beneath the crust of the Earth. Dean still looks up when he thinks of the world they left behind and is presented with a sky the colour of sulphur.

It’s hot. It stinks. But aside from that it looks kind of like the world topside, though based on a yellowed photograph taken after the end of the world. There’s dead grass beneath their feet. Bare trees and an empty river bed.  “This is where the devil’s gates are,” Dean says. “Only this circle has direct access points to the world of the living. Let’s find one and get out of here.”

Sam doesn’t reply, but Dean senses his doubt and worry. It’s gotten stronger since they are together, this one sided bond between them. “What’s wrong?” he asks, concerned. “You know they can’t all have been blocked from the outside. Enough demons get out all the time.” Which might be a problem. They are trying to avoid demons, after all, and the gates might be crowded. Or protected, somehow. There must be a reason why only a few demons make it to the outside every year.

“That’s not it.” Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know if I can leave.” And fuck, he’s afraid. Hell held its breath because he told it to and the thought of never getting out of here still terrifies him. Dean pulls him close because a simple gentle touch does so much here.

“We’ll see. I’m not going anywhere without you. If we have to turn Hell into paradise to get there, we’ll do that.”

Sam snorts softly. “Bobby deserves to know we’re not being tortured for eternity. If you can make it out, you need to tell him.”

“Sam.” Dean rolls his eyes. “We’re either getting out of here together or not at all.” Seriously, does the kid think Dean only came here because he was bored?

“We still need to tell Bobby. Before he does something stupid like try to bring us back.”

“Don’t think that’ll happen. He never did before, remember? And quite right, too. At least one member of the family has to have some sense.” Even as he’s speaking, Dean pulls Sam closer, since having common sense just doesn’t compete with having his brother.

“And yet he’ll be miserable for the rest of his life, thinking we’ll be on the rack forever.”

“Stop worrying about that, Bitch!” Dean smack’s Sam’s head, partially annoyed, partially guilty because Sam’s right, and he worries himself, but until Sam mentioned him he never even remembered Bobby existed. “We don’t even know if you’re stuck here. Even if you are, we’ll send a demon out with a message.”

“Yeah, because demons are so forthcoming. What would I do without your brilliant plans?”

“It that a house?”

“Don’t change the subject!”

“No, really, that’s a house.”

Sam finally looks and yeah, really, there’s a house. It’s standing on a plateau and looks run down and dirty, not to mention that it is very small, but it’s got four intact walls and a roof and promises at least the illusion of shelter.

So they go there. It’s not a difficult climb up and Sam assures Dean that the house is empty, so they aren’t very careful. Dean still goes in first, half expecting to find the inside packed with instruments of torture and sewn off body parts. But there’s only a plain, bare room, insufficiently lit by the dirty yellow light falling in through the dirty windows. They step in, and while the house is too small to allow for more than this one room, they find a door leading to another room in the back anyway. The brothers exchange a glance but wordlessly accept that the thing is bigger on the inside. They’ve seen stranger things in here.

The room in the back is a bedroom with only a tiny, very high window. Dean recognized the room’s purpose because there is a bed in it. A king-sized bed with a mattress on it. The mattress is old and worn and there are no sheets, but its sight is still baffling.

An object meant for comfort in Hell. This shouldn’t be happening.

“Are we safe here?” Dean asks quietly and beside him, Sam wordlessly nods.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

Later, on the mattress of the bed, in the weak twilight of the room, Dean makes love to his brother for the first time. It starts with a kiss and moves to hands sliding over whole and unhurt bodies in reverence and amazement. Then it’s Dean on top of Sam, shielding him, protecting him even as he’s taking, and Sam opening up to him, presenting his throat and his chest and opening his legs to slide them around Dean’s hips and draw him close. Dean senses his vulnerability as much as he sees it, and his absolute trust and love.

There is a reason why he never thought about Bobby so far: Everything that used to be real is so very far away. This should feel wrong but now that’s only an intellectual knowledge. Dean can’t even tell if this is new or if he has always wanted it. He only knows that it is right. It’s theirs. It’s them.

Sam falls asleep in Dean’s arms afterwards and doesn’t have a single bad dream.

 

 

+|+|+

 

 

The house has grown. They walk around it and it’s definitely bigger than it was when they entered. Dean doesn’t even know if it really ever was bigger on the inside or if it spontaneously added another dozen feet in length when they needed a place to sleep. Also, it used to be made of wood, and now it’s stone. Bare stone, admittedly, and the roof still looks like it’ll have to be redone completely in order not to collapse on them, but it’s definitely getting more sturdy.

When they go back inside, they find sheets for their bed and furniture that hasn’t been there before. It’s not in a good shape but Dean is almost convinced that it will be, eventually. Just because they want it to be.

Correction: Because Sam wants it to be. This is all about Sam. This is Hell fucking _courting_ Sam.

This is Sam deciding that they will stay here. His explanation: “The place won’t reject us.” No shit, Sammy. The place built you a fucking house.

And it has just added another room while they were checking out the neighbourhood.

They don’t have any neighbours, which is just as fine. Dean has had his share of guys who would – and did – skin him alive. Sam says there are demons around, but they haven’t gotten any closer for a while. Maybe the two of them are the only ones the place doesn’t reject.

There’s a devil’s gate not far from the house. They will go there soon, see if they can use it – or even find it. So far they only have Sam’s weird knowledge that it’s there for a map.

Funny that Sam can feel demons and exit points, but not Dean. When Dean sneaks up on him to wrap his arms around him from behind, Sam jumps in a moment of panic before melting into Dean’s embrace in relief, and he has no idea how guilty Dean feels for scaring him now he can actually feel his brother’s justified fear.

He’s not really used to it yet. Sometimes, Dean fears he might get lost in Sam who is overwhelmed by his own new senses and the fact that Hell itself has _expectations_ of him. Sometimes there’s something Dean can’t grasp and he nearly panics because it feels like Sam is slipping away.

The window shows a barren, dried out landscape that might never change and Dean closes his eyes as he nuzzles his face in his brother’s hair. Sam has always been the psychic one and Dean never envied him for that kind of power. It seems like a joke that now they have this psychic connection that can be felt only by him.

But then, he thinks as together they sink onto their new, creaky couch, perhaps this is just Hell’s way of reminding Dean what his job is going to be in the grand scheme of things: The same it’s been ever before. “Watch over Sammy.”

As it happens, he is okay with that.

 

 

April 29, 2012


End file.
